Smartphone usage among kids and teenagers has been increasing exponentially during the last decade. Now, it has become very common for even a toddler to have a smartphone or a tablet PC. For teenagers, phones have become a necessary gadget too. Of course, this adds a lot of advantages to the lot, but you cannot turn a blind eye towards the negative aspects.
That is why you may have to track smartphone activities of your kids to keep them on the safe track. Because you cannot always ‘physically’ track your kid, there must be a way to do that remotely. In this article, we’ve made a brief yet complete guide to track smartphone activities of your kids. We can give you a basic outline and you can proceed further.
#1 Choose the Purpose
Every parent would have different smartphone monitoring needs, according to the age of the children also. Some may want to see what their kids are browsing on the internet or who they are talking to via apps like Kik Messenger and WhatsApp. At the same time, some parents may have to prevent their kids from accessing potentially harmful websites, including pornography and self-harm games like Blue Whale. Before we move onto product-based selections, you should have a clear idea about the purpose.
#2 Analyzing the Platform
As of now, your kid is likely to have either an Android phone or an iPhone. As you can guess, both these have different ways of security and offer varying levels of tracking features. There is also a question of whether you are ready to jailbreak your device for iPhone tracking or root the device for Android tracking. However, there are some services that let you monitor smartphone activities without rooting/jailbreaking the devices as well.
#3 Determining the Features
Now that you know what you need and the device you have, you can now start the hunt for the best service for smartphone activity monitoring. Here, you will have to pay attention to the offered features as well. For instance, if you want to know where your kids are going and whether they are meeting someone dangerous, you should get the feature named Geo-Fencing. Similarly, depending on the level of tracking you need, you can list in features like Voice Recording, Media Control etc.
#4 Check the Installation Procedure
Different smartphone activity trackers have different installation processes. As we said earlier, you may have to jailbreak or root the device for advanced features. On the other hand, if you are okay with standard ones, there are options to proceed that way as well. If you want to track iPhone, however, there may be an easier way out. There are a number of smartphone monitoring apps that let you enable monitoring without having to root the device. Instead, the apps use Apple iCloud Sync for tracking.
#5 Privacy Matters
Of course, you must not compromise privacy when it comes to privacy. You would not want anyone to get their hands on sensitive information of your kids, right? So, you should purchase a smartphone tracking app that offers the highest level of privacy. It should be easier to oversee and have a transparent outlook in the overall case. We would not recommend going for free tracking programs, as they tend to sell the information to other sources — violating your whole privacy scene.
Talking about the price, it should be the last deciding factor. If you want a clean and secure way to know what your kids are doing, you should be ready to invest as well. At the end of the day, you will have a number of benefits to count on.
