Cox Communications is offering a new parental control feature that makes it easy to monitor children’s online activity with daily Web surfing reports. The Web history logs show domains or Web sites that children have visited or attempted to access, and flags which sites the parents have deemed inappropriate via customizable filter settings. The service is another feature Cox uses to enhance its customer service.
"Children are very technologically savvy and can make it hard for parents to retrace where they've been online," Steve Gorman, vice president of marketing & management for Cox High Speed Internet, said in a prepared statement. "But the new Web history feature will be one more way parents can stay on top of the Web sites accessed by their children."
The Web history reports can be created for multiple children and sent via a daily e-mail message to one or both parents' cox.net account. The Web history report lists the pages each child has tried to access and which sites were allowed or blocked based on the filtering levels. Cox has offered customizable filtering levels for all children in the household since 2004.
Parents can also use the security suite software to access Web history information in a number of formats. For example, Web history can be viewed for all users or individual users, for all recorded sessions or specific browser sessions. Parents can already use the parental control software to set the amount of time that children spend online. Time limits can be set on a per-day basis, such as two hours maximum spent online per day, or for specific times during the day.
Cox offers its customers safety information and best practices at www.cox.com/takecharge. Via the "Take Charge!" Web site and its partnership with John Walsh, children's advocate and host of America's Most Wanted, Gorman said Cox is educating consumers on how they can filter the television and Internet content entering their home by using tools and controls that are readily available.
