On the Development of Advanced Parental Control Tools

Abstract

Given the lack of completeness of the current implementations of parental control software along with the novel characteristics parents demand on these pieces of software, this paper presents the design decisions and implementation of parental control mechanisms that both register and avoid inappropriate content accesses by children and teenagers through the Internet. We first evaluated the state-of-the-art tools assessing their functionality, efficiency, usability, security, and accuracy. Then, we conducted an exploratory study spanning surveys of a representative sample of children, parents and network administrators to determine the baseline and the main requirements this sort of software must fulfil. With such foundations, we have implemented an application and front-end interface following criteria as relevance and internal consistency. As development method, we have applied Object Oriented Hypermedia Design combined with Natural Language Processing that uses the Boolean Retrieval Model by means of string searching algorithms as Boyer-Moore and fuzzy string search. The results show that not only inappropriate content accesses through the Internet have been blocked, but also that the proposal provides parents with mechanisms to control and measure their children’s Internet use as a fundamental mean in the process of prevention and awareness among the young population.