Do you want to protect your children from cyber bullying and online predators? Are you not sure what the latest slang or abbreviations are? TrueCare.com can help you!
For $9.99 a month your family gets:
-An easy, automatic 24/7 monitoring system
-Activity reports
-The ability to identify true friends from unknown adults
-Resources to online sites that help you with internet safety: http://www.truecare.com/yd/Internet-Safety.htm and their blog: http://blog.truecare.com
-Child ID Kits
-Slangspotter E-newsletter: stay up to date on current slang
-Online guide for popular abbreviations
-Cashback on internet filtering software
-Knowledge if predators live in your neighborhood
-Resources for help with cyber bullying
I tested TrueCare out on my son's facebook account. You can also monitor: Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube accounts. If you are a busy parent and your child has multiple accounts, TrueCare can be a timesaver. In addition to preset terms to look out for, you can add your own terms. You can look at photos/videos and flag them. You can also investigate their friends. However, when I looked up myself, I literally got thousands of people with the same name on the program they refer you to, which is pipl.com. On another friend, not enough came up. You can add search terms, but if you don't know who this friend is, I'm not sure how helpful this feature will be and it will probably take extra effort to try to find the right one.
When I set up my son's account, I thought I had set it up successfully but didn't realize until much later, that I wasn't getting reports because I had not. Once I did set it up, it took less than 24 hours to get e-mail reports on friends that had no mutual friends (me, grandpa; we are not friends yet) and an adult friend (grandpa; my year of birth is not listed in my profile). This may or may not be of true concern for your child, but the good thing is that you are alerted, so that you can investigate. I have had a hard time getting an alert to a photo caption in which I purposefully put a term that I wanted to be alerted on; after several tries, I'm still waiting. You can also search for other things like URLs. I also found the site to be slow, compared to other sites that I frequent.
However, if your child has multiple accounts, and you find that you can't monitor his/her plethora of activity, then this site can be helpful. So far, I haven't found it to be completely helpful, but maybe I am doing something wrong in trying to get it to recognize my term?
If you would like to try TrueCare, sign up for 2 free months at: truecare.com/bzzagent
After the free trial period is over, it costs $9.99 a month.
Disclaimer: I received a free 3 month trial since I am a bzzagent.
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