Here are 5 Smartphone Applications That Need Concerned Parents

Here are 5 Smartphone Applications That Need Concerned Parents

Here are 5 Smartphone Applications That Need Concerned Parents - Owning a smartphone filled with countless apps that can help one from keeping track of their appointments to telling them how many calories they have lost by walking down the road is a norm these days. Yet, there are a few apps that parents should worry about as soon as they see them on their kids’ phones. Here are 5 of the worse apps your child could have on their phones.

Vine

Vine is home to some of the most popular online celebrities like King Bach who makes vine one of the most entertaining and fun social networking platforms out there. But like everything else, there are good ways to use vine and then there are the bad ones. The bad ones being the fact that one can upload any kind of pornographic material on vine without any restrictions. Now Hofmann, Yusupov and Kroll, the founders, incorporated a 17+ age restriction to make an account for vine, however, it is fairly simple for teens to make an account on vine.

Other than just viewing inappropriate videos on Vine, they can also upload their own videos which may or may not be indecent in nature and may even contain child abuse content.

ChatRoulette or Omegle

Same as other social networking apps on this list, ChatRoulette and Omegle allow teens to talk to strangers from all over the world. Now, these two apps are a mile ahead from other apps of its kind, providing video chatting facility, it is one of the most inappropriate apps for minors on the internet these days.

There are several features that the founders and the owners of these apps certainly overlooked. One being the fact that you can record the online video chats and upload them anywhere on the internet meaning that what your child says or does can most certainly come back to bite them in the near future. It also greatly increases the chances of cyber bullying. A large number of people just log into these apps to bully people and turn them against the people they love.

Ask.fm

Ask.fm allows access to a feature that is unlike any other, it enable its users to ask fellow members questions. Now these questions can very well be of any nature, there is no profanity filter of any sorts that prevents people from asking personal or sometimes sexual question from other people.

The questions aren’t reviewed by anyone so that it can be filtered before being published, that is the reason that abuse on ask.fm has been growing rapidly. If you fear that someone is bullying you online on ask.fm, it does come with the option to block people. However, the people you block can still view your profile and know about all your likes and dislikes and you can’t do anything about it.

Blendr

Blendr is an app which allows anyone to communicate with someone anywhere on the planet. However, it also incorporates a feature that uses the GPS Location of a device to find users located nearby. It’s never safe when strangers know your child’s location up to the block you live in. Even if we ignore the GPS Locating feature, it is also a pretty harmful app for the young minds because it allows online predators to prey on their minds and without anyone finding out about it.

Kik

This is another free texting app that enables children to talk to strangers, you don’t need to know anything about the other person, and you could just type in random names and hope for the best.

Other than the fact that you can search random people, there are also apps available on Google Play Store and the Apple Store that can provide usernames for males and females, whichever you may be interested in.

You don’t need to download the app to find out that it is mostly used to sexting, the app description and the comments on the app says it all. There are several hundred comments of people providing their private information and asking girls and boys for sexting and role play which makes it seems like a 100% hookup site.

The Bottom Line
           These are just 5 of the hundreds, even thousands of apps in the market that put the mind of children at great risk. The fact that kids can gain access to these apps as soon as they learn how to operate a smartphone is a cause of great worry for parents all over the world. The thrill of having explicit chats with strangers could very well be the only thing that could ruin the rest of their lives and get them addicted to stuff like pornography which very well leads to an act that the children might regret greatly in the future. Hence, using a smartphone monitoring app is the best precaution for parents in the world today.



Author Bio: 
Elizbeth is a blogger and writer. She loves to write about digital parenting teens and issues related them. She is currently working on monitoring you kid’s text messages to keep an eye on you kid. Follow her on twitter @elizbethsewell6