What is the best software to protect your child from the dangers of the internet?

[BigmummaL]

One of my good friend has a 12 yr old daughter and is very concerned about her using the internet. What is the best software around to protect her from potential dangers?

I'm interested in this too

Don't think there is anything that is 100%. At the school where I taught they had NetNanny but there were constantly new sites and stuff that weren't blocked by the program.

You also cannot protect against the dangers posed by MSN.

Personally I don't think that as parents we can leave our children unsupervised on the internet. The computer should be in the family room and the parent should check what their childis doing

I wonder whether we are wrong to think of software to protect children. Maybe we should be thinking of making them aware and monitoring what they are doing. I suppose it depends what "dangers" we are talking about. The biggest danger presumably is them making "friends" with someone and going to meet them in RL? I don't think there's any software that can protect them from this - awareness and monitoring is the only thing that will. Or are we talking about them seeing stuff we consider unsuitable?

Thanks for your responses.

I think it's all types of potential dangers that are on the internet, whether it be the site itself or chatting to someone who isn't who they say they are and meeting up in rl.

I think it's a problem also that children (in the majority of cases are more computer literate than the parents), so parents are left feeling in the dark.

I agree with what you said Kateyle frequent monitoring does need to be made and parents need to educate themselves on the internet in order to understand the culture.