When it comes to the home computer, parents have to decide amongst themselves how to control
how the computer can be accessed, and by whom, at what times, at what level of freedom, and
whether it will be with supervision or without. it is up to the parents how they choose to
restrict access to certain websites by the use of Internet filters, or whether they will trust
in their child and permit full and unsupervised access to the Internet and the files stored
on the computer.
In the case the parents who want to exert some control over how their children use the computer
and access the Internet, there are a variety of software tools available to assist with this
task, and to make the job of controlling access and monitoring behavior as easy, and as hands-free
as possible. For example parents can use the previously mentioned 'internet filter', which is
designed to block access to certain websites and web content for example pornography, hate
and racist content, violence, and areas which may be dangerous, such as those frequented by
predators such as chat groups and so forth. There are also other types of parental controls,
for example those that can scan a computer and detect the key indicators of pornographic content
and files, and present those for review by the software user to determine whether they should
be deleted or kept.
Parental controls of the second type can be used to help clean hard drive files with minimal
user interaction. This saves the user being saddled with the need to manually analyse thousands
of files on the computer and go searching for files that may be hidden in many thousands of
directories. Some examples of this type of parental control can be found here and here. These
products are capable of testing many types of files including images and movies, compressed
files, Microsoft office documents various formats and more.