Nowadays there are many filters available that can by used by parents to protect their children from viewing any online pornographic material and other undesirable online images on their home computers. These filters are very effective and almost foolproof.
However with advancing smartphone technology a new danger has arisen; viewing pornography on an internet enabled phone. Undesirable websites can be readily accessed by children on their phones and up until now there has been no way of preventing this from happening.
However, thanks to a new invention by Samsung, parents may be able to regain control of what their children can download.
This new invention allows parents to monitor on their own handsets what their children are viewing on theirs. The system monitors what is being displayed on the screen of the child’s phone by searching for certain tell-tale clues, for instance if there are large areas of exposed skin. If the phone decides that the image is undesirable, it shuts down the screen and sends a copy of the suspect image to the parent’s phone.
If it is a false alarm, the parent can re-enable the child’s phone or if it is not a false alarm can choose to keep it disenabled.
The system also has a number of options. For instance it can be set to warn the child that a copy of what is being viewed will be sent to the parent unless the child stops watching it immediately.
The problem with the system lies in the detection of undesirable material. . Similar “negative content filtering” systems have been tried before with mixed results. One problem is that the systems can be fooled by illumination levels, background, image quality and skin colour. However complex algorithms can search for other indicators that the images are less than wholesome.
Another problem is that as the technologies for blocking undesirable content get smarter, the technologies that deliver the material get smarter too. However, even if the system is less than 100% perfect, it will be better than the nothing that is currently available.
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