.Dust

In the last few months I went through a num­ber of mobile web browsers in order to test their func­tion­al­ity while brows­ing what we call “The Big Inter­net”. Between these browser I can count Nokia Web Browser (WebKit), Novarra, Opera Mini, etc.

They were actu­ally very good in deliv­er­ing what they promised. Surf the inter­net on your mobile phone no mat­ter if the web site was designed for mobile phones or not.

That’s cool. We have been wait­ing for years for this to come true. I know there are still lot of prob­lems to be solved in this areas (JavaScript, Flash, Flash Video, etc.) but this is not the main point for this post.

Yes­ter­day I come across a post from Jon Udell about the con­trol­ling kid’s usage of inter­net. The post is very well worth read­ing and as I com­mented on Jon post I agree on his view, mon­i­tor, not control.

I then matched the two things. Today we have a lot of third party soft­ware and, is some cases, native soft­ware that will allow par­ent to mon­i­tor or con­trol kid’s usage of Internet.

This does not apply to the mobile world. Basi­cally with a mobile phone you can browse what­ever ser­vice you want with­out any pos­si­bil­ity of mon­i­tor­ing or con­trol­ling usage. The con­cept of super­vi­sion of an adult does not apply.

I went through a quick search and the only ref­er­ence to a prod­uct ded­i­cated to mobile phones is this:

Ni Mobile Phone Security

This prod­uct is not yet still released, but, from what I can read from the prod­uct page, it will allow par­ents to:

• Web block­ing and filtering.
• Instant Mes­sage monitoring.
• Call records logged.
• Calls restricted to approved num­bers or approved duration.
• SMS text mes­sages logged.
• SMS text restricted to spe­cific num­bers or volumes.
• GPRS time logged.
• GPRS con­nec­tion time restricted.
• Pre­mium rate warning/​blocked.
• Restricted access to cer­tain applications.
• Phone SIM card lock.

That’s quite a com­pre­hen­sive list of func­tion­al­i­ties that will really allow par­ents to imple­ment some kind of control.

Con­tin­u­ing the read­ing of the fea­tures it seems that you will be able to con­trol the func­tion­al­i­ties of the appli­ca­tion via a web inter­face that will prob­a­bly be hosted by the prod­uct devel­oper and push the new con­fig­u­ra­tion to the mobile phone (this is what I am think­ing about it since no explicit expla­na­tion is present on the prod­uct infor­ma­tion page).

If you are famil­iar with mobile phone soft­ware you will under­stand that this kind of appli­ca­tion will inter­act with very low level func­tions of the phone and, because of this, I think it will be avail­able only on those mobile phone with an advanced Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (e.g. Sym­bian or Microsoft Win­dows Mobile).

This issue is some­thing that at some point in time will be taken in con­sid­er­a­tion by reg­u­la­tors. I do not really see any other viable solu­tion today.

Two final considerations:

• My son is only six month old and by the time he will need a mobile phone I am pretty much sure that some­thing will be available.
• Another good appli­ca­tion for this kind of appli­ca­tion is to mon­i­tor if some­thing is cheat­ing on you.

Why do I blog this? I think that in the near future this is some­thing that oper­a­tors will have to face. The mobile phone is in your kids hands and it will need to be con­trolled, in some way or another.

Related posts:

1. Con­trol your home from your mobile phone
2. Friends Gen­er­ated Con­tent. What’s next?
3. Mobile Web Toolkit for Word­Press from beeweeb
4. My fat mobile phone
5. Buy­ing music from a mobile phone