Parental control on smartphones: should you monitor your child on the Internet?
“What they look at, it concerns us all! » This is the message broadcast in several awareness videos playing in a loop on television to educate parents to pay attention to what their children watch. But why pay attention to what young people watch and do on their phones? Is it legal to spy on children? And above all, how to monitor your children’s phone? These are the questions we will answer in this article!
Why monitor children’s phones?
The message broadcast by French awareness videos suggests that adults are responsible for what their children watch. And the content found on the internet and on social networks can often shock young people due to their pornographic, violent or hateful nature.
Since the democratization of social networks and various free exchange websites, many children have been harassed. This often occurs following an argument between young people, but harassment can also be orchestrated by adults with ill intentions and, in this second case, the consequences can sometimes turn into tragedy. In France, as everywhere in the world, many children have killed themselves as a result of harassment.
Cyberbullying: an evil that is difficult to detect
It is indeed complicated to detect signs of harassment when the victim is a child. This was always the case, but since children have had cell phones, access to the internet and the freedom that comes with it, they have tended to hide what they are doing in front of their screens. However, it is often on the internet and more particularly on social networks that cyberharassment is rife.
Some experts suggest that parents have more open discussions with their children so that they can confide in them everything that is happening in their lives. In theory, this is indeed a good idea, but in practice, it is not always sufficient. Even if they are very close to their parents, children are often hesitant to disclose unpleasant events such as cyberbullying. There’s no point in attacking school officials because they too don’t know what students are doing on the internet from their mobile phones.
Faced with this scourge, the only foolproof solution is to monitor your children’s phones. This way, the slightest sign of harassment can be detected in time and responsible adults can take appropriate measures quickly. But you still need to know how to monitor your children’s phone.
Is it legal to spy on children’s phones?
Before providing you with the simplest solution to monitor your children’s phone, we would first like to take stock of the legality of this action. So, is it legal to monitor your children since it still constitutes espionage?
Monitoring your children’s phone may or may not be legal depending on the situation. To act legally in any case, you must respect the following conditions:
- The child to be supervised is a minor
- The supervisor is one of the child’s parents or legal guardian
- The phone belongs to the person who will monitor the child
If these conditions are met, we then speak of parental control. However, in addition to being completely legal, parental control is even encouraged in France. As we briefly mentioned earlier, the French authorities are broadcasting awareness videos encouraging parents to monitor what children are doing in front of their screen. It’s nothing more than parental control.
We would also like to point out that it is also possible to monitor the phone of an adult legally. For this, there is only one valid condition and it consists of previously informing the target adult (the one to be monitored) that their phone is being spied on. This is what people do who want to check the fidelity of their partner, parents who want to control their adult children and entrepreneurs who want to boost the productivity of their employees.
How to monitor children’s phones?
But how to monitor your children’s phone? There are several solutions for this, but we are going to stick to the simplest one, which is using cell phone spy software. And as spy software, we are going to offer you mSpy, a reference in the world of legal espionage and whose use is aimed at all profiles.
mSpy: the best solution for parental control?
If we chose mSpy as spyware, it is because it presents all the conditions for an average user. Simplified as much as possible, its installation and use are within the reach of everyone, even a child. But what can you do with mSpy?
As it is spyware, mSpy allows you to monitor the phone of a child or an adult in different ways.
mSpy can:
- Monitor Android and iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.)
- Access incoming and outgoing phone calls
- Record the contents of incoming and outgoing phone calls
- Access incoming and outgoing text messages (SMS) from the target smartphone
- Access incoming and outgoing messages from instant messaging applications (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, etc.)
- Access activities on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.)
- Access all media content of the target phone (photos, videos and audio library)
- Access the exact GPS location of the target phone in real time
- Access the visited website from the phone browser and block certain inappropriate web pages
We must admit that we have complete spyware here. To install mSpy, start by going to the spyware’s official website, click try and create an account. Once the account has been created, from the mobile phone to be monitored, download the mSpy application from the link sent to you by email during account creation. Install this software and link it to your mSpy account following the instructions provided. At this point, you are ready to monitor the phone of your children or, possibly, an adult (spouse, wife, employees, etc.).