With Android phones now becoming more accessible even to students and “tweeners”, Symantec released their Norton Safety Minder: Mobile Edition, a free app that allows parents to keep an eye on their kids’ smartphone activities. The application is part of Norton Online Family, the online family safety service for PCs and Macs. Through the new app, parents can avail themselves of several tools to teach kids safe and age-appropriate digital habits on their mobile devices.
The application provides web monitoring and blocking features for free, allowing parents to see what sites their kids are visiting and block content they feel is inappropriate. Applied through their Norton Online Family account, parents can use the same set of web filtering settings for the child’s PC and apply them to the child’s Android phone.
To get started, parents download the app on their child’s Android phone, login to their Norton Online Family account (or create one from within the application) and can then centrally manage the “œHouse Rules” on that device through the onlinefamily.norton.com website. More than a dozen phones can be easily added to the same account at no charge, with unique settings for each, allowing parents a single point to manage varied settings for kids of different ages.
Pricing and Availability
Norton Safety Minder: Mobile Edition is available for free in the Android Market at market.android.com, and can be downloaded in English, Japanese, German and Polish. Android version 2.2 or 2.3 is required on the device.
Parents must have a Norton Online Family account in order to activate the application, which they must first install on their child’s device. A free, basic Norton Online Family account will activate the mobile web-filtering and monitoring within Norton Safety Minder for Android. A paid subscription to Norton Online Family Premier, currently only available in the US, will unlock the application’s additional advanced features, such as SMS text monitoring.