Parental Security Control: A tool for monitoring and securing children's online activities.

The use of internet browsing through laptops, desktop systems, and mobile phones by kids has augmented manifold during this COVID-19 pandemic for online education. Since there is an inordinateness of objectionable content on the internet, the kids might get exposed to this content typically accidentally whereas sometimes intentionally. Therefore, it becomes vital to observe the web activities of kids by the parents. The lack of parental control, guidance & inability of parents to monitor their kids throughout the whole time frame motivated us to style and develop a parental control and management tool. Initially, we conducted a background study to understand the state-of-the-art tools currently available in the market and compare those tools in terms of functionality, accuracy, efficiency, usability, and security. We also studied the benchmark requirements set by the parents and the freedom of access expressed by the children. We have implemented a front-end solution and an Android App that follows the default criteria set by us. As the internet is a highly dynamic space, we have used a Machine Learning-based approach to classify the website dynamically to provide dynamicity to the tool. The very basic idea is to scrape a website's content once the user enters the URL and then apply an appropriate algorithm to classify the same, essentially converting the problem into a multi-class classification problem. The result indicates that our tool efficiently blocks inappropriate content and facilitates parents with features to control and monitor their children's online activity and help mitigate the risk of cyber threats for children of the current age.