Keeping your children safe through their mobile phones

AN IRISH-based firm has unveiled new software aimed at keeping children safe on their mobile phones.

The brainchild of MM Technologies, Mobile Minder helps identify potential child-safety issues for parents such as cyber-bullying, inappropriate photographs and messages their child may receive on their smartphone.

It works through an application installed on a child’s smartphone, and an online platform that parents can use to monitor their child’s activity when necessary. That includes everything from length of calls and texts to website history and app usage, giving parents a detailed look at mobile activity.

With about one in five Irish children reported to have experienced some form of cyber-bullying, the software intends to ease parental concerns and alert them to situations of which they may have been otherwise unaware.

As well as flagging inappropriate content, parents can use the software to get real-time information on their child’s location, receive alerts when their child reaches a predetermined location, and to see the interactions between their child and their mobile contacts in a visual display.

An emergency “help me” button can instantly broadcast the child’s location to a parent through a text message.

The Mobile Minder software came out of a existing project on which MM Technologies chief executive Don Corbett and co-founder Brian Shannon were working.

“Things were moving quite slowly, so we decided to adapt it to the child protection market,” Corbett says. “We looked at the existing solutions out there and they seemed to assume that your child was doing wrong, and parents needed to know about it.

“That’s the wrong approach I believe – I think it’s about creating trust. It’s not about creating a tool that spies on your child, it’s about creating an alert system so if your child is in any sort of danger or needs your help, they can get your assistance.”

Earlier versions of Mobile Minder were adapted after feedback from some users that gave rise to new features and refined existing ones.

The software cannot be disabled by the child, but, in keeping with the company’s “trust” approach, it is flagged by an icon in the phone’s on-screen notification bar that alerts users of the phone that the software is running in the background.

“The icon is visible. It’s about trust; the child knows it’s there,” Corbett says.

The subscription service works with Android and BlackBerry phones and costs about 10 cents a day. It is available in Ireland, the United States and the United Arab Emirates. More markets are expected to join in the coming months, with the company also looking at Africa.

MM Technologies, which is a subsidiary of Associate Mobile, is a relatively new company, having been established in May last year. It currently employs 11 people.