New Research Highlights Drop In Downloads For Popular Parental Control And Monitoring Apps

It appears that British citizens are losing interest in parental control applications. And that not only puts their children at risk but even puts a leading number of their own electronic devices at stake to malware threats.

The news comes to us thanks to a recently published report by NordVPN that outlined how figures for downloads of leading parental control and monitoring platforms in the United Kingdom are falling during Q1 of 2023.

VPN experts are taking into consideration data belonging to Microsoft Family Safety and Google’s Family Link among others that raised a red flag after a decline was observed.

To better put things into perspective, the apps saw a growth of nearly 41% in the past year. Now when you compare that to 2021, the figures of these top five platforms fell by 2.4% as confirmed by the authors of this report.

You can imagine that if parents are the ones losing interest in such control apps they’re not only putting kids at risk of threats from the advanced tech world of today. They’re similarly putting their own devices, digital identities, and files at risk.

As previously put out by NordVPN’s CTO, the issue is that malware can travel from one infected device of a child through the home router into various other endpoints. And in case it just remains in the router, there is a huge risk attached.

So many parents forget that malware behaves like the flu and despite protective measures in place, you can still attain it through your child’s device, no matter how many precautions you exercise.

So despite many people adopting all sorts of protective measures and avoiding the malicious type of content across the board, tracking kids’ behavior online is also necessary among other precautions on the rise. Moreover, users’ home network is even secure and that’s one major vulnerable part that is linked to this.

Experts further explained that parents can ensure kids’ devices are protected at all times by keeping a reminder for updates of the router’s firmware and renaming networks that are better known as SSID. The names tend to alter from time to time so keep a lookout for that.

But as a whole, the main take-home message is to keep all connected devices protected, including those utilized by kids.

H/T: Techradar

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