IJ received her first smartphone this week courtesy of the Tots100 and she absolutely loves it. She has spent the majority of her time texting me, usually when she’s in the same room as me and often simply to say hello. The novelty of this is yet to wear off.
We received the phone to try out the new Vodafone Guardian App. It’s a free Android app that’s basically designed to help keep children safer when using a smartphone.
The app does of course keep children safer as applying parental controls to a phone is better than nothing at all, but the main problem I have with the app is that the settings are too easy to override.
Within minutes of downloading the app and adjusting the setting to block Internet access completely, I was able to log on to Google, enter the word sex and bring up a list of porn sites. So it failed at the first hurdle.
When you try to override the settings, the phone brings up a message like this:
The emergency override button does as it says - it disables the app and allows you to do what you want with the phone until it reactivates itself 15 minutes later. When you override the settings it immediately sends a text to the parent’s contact number to say the app has been deactivated. But there’s not a lot you can do about that if you’re nowhere near your child’s phone at the time.
Once the system has reactivated, it can easily be deactivated for a further 15 minutes, and so on. It is possible to switch off the emergency override function but Vodafone suggests you think very carefully before doing so. While it’s not the case that all children would attempt to override the settings, some might or their friends might and that makes me very uncomfortable.
There are other aspects of the app that are more useful. For example, you can block specific contacts or mobile phone numbers to prevent bullying messages or calls. Bullying text messages can also be transferred to a secure folder and used as evidence to the police You can also specific times during which your child can make and receive calls, use apps, access the Web and use the camera (if you haven’t decided to switch these off entirely).
Used together with Vodafone’s parents guide I can certainly see the benefits of this app for older children who use mobile phones regularly. For younger children the settings seem all too easy to override and unsuitable content on the Internet too easy to access as a result. Nevertheless it could be argued that if you give a young child a smartphone with Internet access then that does carry an element of risk.
Personally I think eight is too young for a smartphone and testing out this app has done nothing to change my mind on this.
What do you think? Would you buy a pre-teen a smartphone?
We received a Vodafone smartphone with SIM card and credit free of charge for the purpose of this review.
