Las Vegas, January 11: Stun gun maker Taser wants to help parents – not with jolts of electricity but with a tool which allows parents to effectively take over a child’s cellphone and manage its use.
“Basically we’re taking old fashioned parenting and bringing it into the cellphone era,” Taser chair and co-founder Tom Smith said at the Consumer Electronics Show here, where the Arizona company unveiled the new product.
“Because when you give your child his cellphone you don’t know who they’re talking to, what they’re sending or SMSing, all of those things,” Smith told AFP.
The phone application, called “Mobile Protector”, allows a parent to screen a child’s incoming and outgoing calls and messages, block particular numbers and even listen in on a conversation.
A dashboard on a parent’s phone or a personal computer shows the cellphones being monitored and the permitted callers such as friends and family.
“You can start it out very restrictive and then as they get older you can relax those restrictions as that trust factor’s gained,” Smith said.
An alert is triggered when an unknown number calls a child’s phone.
—Agencies