Tiscali: Protect your Children

Protecting your children needn't mean spying on them. Nothing matters more than your children's safety. But children still need their space and freedom online. Crisp keeps track of their relationships, without spoiling their fun.

How does Crisp maintain my childs privacy?
Children are naturally suspicious of any kind of software that is designed to keep them safe on the internet. This is because every previous solution, unlike Crisp, has relied upon either restricting or preventing their access to content or on spying on their internet browsing and conversations.

Crisp circumvents these concerns to the greatest possible extent by allowing you to view your childs chat room dialogue only if an alert is generated around that conversation. Even then Crisp will only show you the specific lines of text that has generated the alert, not the whole conversation.

You will not get an alert just because your child or their correspondent has used a naughty word.

Should I tell my kids that I have installed Crisp?
It is up to you. Crisp provides a useful tool to help parents keep their children safe on the internet. We are not here to tell parents how to be parents.

The Crisp software has been designed to maximise the privacy children have whilst keeping them protected. This can enable parents to engage in conversations with their children about their internet usage without appearing to be snooping on their activity.

The Symantec Norton Online Living Report found that only 44% of UK parents had spoken to their children about practicing safe online habits (the second lowest rate out of all the countries surveyed). By contrast 87% of UK children claimed to be comfortable talking to their parents about their online experiences. Having an open dialogue with your children about their internet usage is very important but is not enough on its own. Children need a safety net as well, Crisp aims to provide that.

Will my children be able to uninstall the software?
It is never straightforward to remove software from a home PC but a knowledgeable and determined teenager will usually find a way to do so. At Crisp we focus our efforts on developing software to stop online predators not software to stop children uninstalling our programmes.

What Crisp will do is send you a monthly report telling you how many lines of chat we have analysed from your household. So if you notice that Crisp has not analysed any lines of chat for a month long period that could mean that your child is no longer using their instant messenger accounts at home, that the software has developed a fault or been uninstalled. In this case you should check that the Crisp display box appears during your computers start up process and that the Crisp icon is displayed in the tool bar when the computer is on.

The best way to avoid this kind of problem is to tell your child that you are installing Crisp. Explain that the programme is not designed to spy on them or block their access, and show them how it works. In the end it is much easier to protect a child from danger when they are working with you.

Will Crisp interfere with a young person's enjoyment of the Internet?
For the first time, young people will have a safe opportunity to communicate freely when using online-messaging and the internet. Until now the surest solution to keep children safe online, was to prevent them from using chat rooms and messaging. With Crisp, young people have freedom online, whilst their conversations are monitored for evolving suspicious patterns and language that might be a threat to them.