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Spector offers the perfect solution to monitoring the internet and PC activity of your children. Just install Spector and in less than 24 hours you will have a detailed, second-by-second recording of everything they do online and offline.

Spector as a Child Recording Tool

The Internet opens a world of possibilities for your children that were not available when you were a child, or even as recently as a few years ago.

From a personal computer with an Internet connection, your child has access to almost any encyclopedia, dictionary, book, magazine or newspaper in the world. Your child can chat with friends and relatives, meet new people, learn foreign languages, develop new interests.

There is no doubting the tremendous benefits the Internet brings to your family.

The flip side is that, while the world is at your child's fingertips, the world is also allowed into your home.

While most of these people who come into your home through the Internet are very nice, some of them are looking for your name, your address, phone number and other personal information. Some are even looking for a child with whom to have sex.

In fact, it is estimated that at least 50,000 pedophiles descend on the Internet every day with one goal in mind: to find a child, strike up a relationship, and eventually meet with the child.

What can you do?

As a parent, you essentially have 3 choices:

1. Disconnect your child from the Internet
2. Filter or censor what your child can access on the Internet.
3. Monitor and Record what your child does online and who he/she chats with so that you can better guide your child as to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.

Option number 1 is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. There is too much value to be derived from the Internet to shut it off, and your child will be at a tremendous disadvantage when part of their homework assignment is to do research on the Internet.

Filtering or censoring is, in our opinion, better than option 1, and until recently, was about your only option. However, there are far too many problems with filtering and censoring.

The first problem with filtering is that it depends on your constantly downloading lists that prevent your child from visiting certain sites. Since thousands of new sites come onto the Internet each day, keeping up is virtually impossible.

The second problem with filtering is that every family has a different set of values about what is objectionable and what is acceptable. There is no way than any one filter list can be appropriate for all families.

The third problem is that many filtering/censoring products create lists of keywords which, when encountered, prevent you or your child from accessing a site that has that keyword. For example, let's say the word "breast" is on the keyword list. Seems reasonable, right? Well what if USA Today has an article on breast cancer? What if Tyson has an article on chicken breast meat? Well, too bad, because breast is a "bad word", so you or your child are not allowed access to that site.

So disconnecting your child from the Internet is not a good choice, and filtering/censoring is a poor choice. That leaves the third option: monitoring and recording what your child does online, and whom your child talks to online.

With this option, your child has access to he Internet and there is no filtering or censoring. However, if your inform you child that he/she is being monitored and recorded and that you can review what has been done later, your child will behave much more responsibly when surfing the Internet.

In addition, because you can review with your child their online activity, you can help guide your child as to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.

In addition, through reviewing chat conversations and e-mails, you can determine whether an adult stranger has been trying to develop a questionable relationship with your child, long before it has a chance to develop into something that could become dangerous.

After examining the options available to address the very real dangers children face on the Internet, SpectorSoft decided that monitoring and recording was the most reasonable option.

We believe that parents need to spend time with their children, especially when they are surfing the Internet, but we also understand that a parent cannot always be present when the child is online. Spector helps to bridge that gap, by recording what the child does so that the parent can review this at a later time.

Because Spector acts like a video recorder for PC and Internet activity, you will be able to SEE EXACTLY what your child has been doing online. Spector records all web sites visited, all programs run, all keystrokes typed, all chat conversations, and all e-mails sent and received. Spector even records Internet based e-mails like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.