SocialShield

Smart Tools for Smart Parents

Parental Control Feature Summary

  • Time Limit Controls: No
  • Internet Blocking: No
  • Web Filtering: No
  • Chat Monitoring: No
  • Activity Reports: Yes
  • Email Alerts: Yes
  • Remote Access: Yes
  • Download Blocking: No
  • Predator Alerts: No
  • Keystroke Logging: No
  • 100% Guarantee: No
  • Trial Download: Yes, w/credit card
  • Price: $10

SocialShield Parental Control Software Review

SocialShield is a search engine software that monitors and investigates what is going on with your children's social networking activities in popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. It has the capability to search more than over 50 web databases to ensure your kid's social networking friend's identities are legitimate. It works as an independent program that can access and monitor your child's social networking activities whether he uses the computer at home, in school, on net café's, or even using their mobile phones.

This software is not like other parental control program that has stealth capability wherein you can monitor your children's computer and internet activities without giving them any hint. With Socialshield you need to involve your children's participation and respect their privacy if they insist to decline your kind gesture of monitoring their social networking life.

To activate the program you need to setup an account on their website. Next, you input your child's data such as their name, home address, school and other social organizations they participate along with their email addresses. The program then sends an email to each child's email that you want to monitor. Every child must then give their parents consent by opting in into the program. This is the only way your monitoring agenda will ever work.

Here are more features that SocialShield has to offer:

  • Has remote monitoring feature wherein you can check your children's social networking activities via their website or through email reports.
  • Has the capability to monitor and record what your children are saying about in their accounts and what others are also saying about them.
  • Has language monitoring system that immediately alerts you via email with red flag words such as drugs, violence, sex, etc.
  • Can check your children's friend's profil including their age, public records and criminal backgrounds with over more than 50 online databases.
  • Can warn you if your child's friend has fewer connections to his/her other online peers.
  • Can search online databases, videos and photo galleries that can be associated with your child.

SocialShield has two monitoring level system. It has the relationship monitoring level where it can check your children's friends profile and the language monitoring level that relies on basic wordlists that alerts parents for profanity and malicious word activities on your child's social networking sites.

Relationship monitoring system can search up to over 50 databases of your children's friend's profile. It checks their age, other public online information such as work backgrounds, email addresses, online organizations, etc. and criminal records if any. However, SocialShield has restrictions in cases where they have set their social and online information on private mode. The system does not violate anyone's privacy.

SocialShield can also alert you of your child has friends who are by far has fewer friend connections with your other child's friends. The system will tag them UNUSUAL in its reports. Reports will also show all your children's latest social activities including their blogs or social posts.

This is where the language monitoring level comes in handy. Before anything else you need to take note that SocialShield does not monitor chats and private messages rather it only monitors your child's social posts. Let say they posted "I will research on effects of drug overdose and usage of marijuana tonight for my science project" on their Facebook account, the system will then recognize flag words such as drug overdose and marijuana and sends immediate alerts to you via email.

Sure it recognizes red flag words but it does not read the whole context of the message. Therefore it might be difficult for some parents who might receive false alerts that are with no sense of urgency to be in the first place. This is yet another feature that needs to be developed in the future.

SocialShield does not only monitor activities that are made by your children. It can also alert you if there are any actions taken by other social networking users in any way that it involves your child. Let say his/her 35 years old teacher adds him in Facebook or Twitter and then posts a video or photo of your child's science class project about marijuana and effects of drug overdose.

SocialShield will then alert you that an adult is trying to add your child and a photo is being uploaded on your child's profile. It can also search data bases outside social networking sites. Anyone who uploads videos or photos of your child on any website will also be detected by SocialShield.

Latency for cleanup of reports which takes more than 2 days might be an issue for others. Other than that SocialShield plays a powerful tool for parents who want get a bird's eye view, to be involved and monitor their children's social networking activity.