Kaspersky Safe Kids. I’d rather they didn’t
I remember those days, when I was a child, and the only parental control possible was a power cord that parent might take away pushing me to do something better than just play computer games. Those days were gone. Now we have smartphones, tablets, laptops, fast internet and many-many other things that current youth cannot live without. They became smarter, so we should be either.
Time is money. It was always like that and extremely important nowadays. Personally i do not have so much time setting up parental control by myself and then maintain it. That is why we found Kaspersky Safe Kids. The Suite has everything inside with quite tasty prices. Everything from internet and location monitoring on iOS or Android devices to time and apps control on Mac and Windows. And Linux too, right? Well, are your kinds using Linux?! Do they by any chance know how to recompile the Linux’s kernel? If so, do you really think you are still able to control them?)
With a free but limited app version you may try to grasp the idea of what Safe Kids is look like before paying for it. With full version you may control websites that your kids browses on desktop and mobile, control which app he/she may install and use and finally limit the time child’s laptop or mac is available. On Android devices you may see and do more. Almost like a “big brother”. It is even possible to get some info about child’s Facebook and Vkontakte (Russians will understand) accounts.
Everything is so bright and shiny. For nasty moments you always may ask Support for help. Well, yes, you may, but …
Ok-ok. I lied. Not everything is so bright and shiny. Bugs or weird behaviour is everywhere. Some bugs were reported, some ones, i decided, they do not worth my time. Now, however, i see that nothing there is worth the time i spent on it. Support does not shun switch responsibility accusing customers with not doing something right and even ask them to become a beta tester. For free of course.
So what are the problems? Location, for instance. It is there, it shows something but something that is pretty random. It is totally fine for Safe Kids to get notification, that my daughter’s iPhone, that lays 1 meter from me, suddenly were checked in in other place 5 km away. On the same device Life360 (that has awesome free app) shows pretty precise result (in most cases). Be ready to get inaccurate web statistics or scarce functionality on iOS. Competitors by they way, provide much more features in their products, but has other drawbacks as well.
I do not want to go into details about every problem i found. It is not about 2 or 3 of them, but closer to 20. Almost every piece of Desktop or Mobile or even web app have problems. I can understand that though. I am a Software Engineer and know how things work under the hood. But what i cannot understand is why the Support is so crappy? Don’t they care? Do not they need my money? That reminds me Lumocity (google for it), that we gave up using after half a year because of bad support. Let’s see for how log we can keep going here.
