Kids & teens can bypass child protection software

Earlier, I wrote about giving teens and children their own computer to use. A fellow blogger then suggested using child protection software.

While child protection software may help, we better not underestimate the ability of teens and children to disable such protection, and then hide the fact that they did so.

After all, the information on how to do these is often publicly available - http://www.zensur.freerk.com/#3.5


I know a teen who disabled the anti-spyware software I installed for his parents so that he can install some questionable Peer-to-Peer software. The computer became infected with spyware and slowed to a crawl soon after.

The poor parents only knew how to check email, surf the Internet and type Word documents. They called me to fix their computer when some persistent pornographic advertisements started appearing (due to one of the many spyware the computer was infected with).

When I made known the sabotage, the teen was unrepentant and seemed more frustrated that his favorite program could no longer run. He was last seen trying to disable the anti-spyware software just before I left.