Netnanny Trial
Cori Lenon
Net Nanny is top-rated parental control software that parents have trusted since 1996. With the #1-rated Internet filter that can scan webpages and filter inappropriate content every time a page is loaded, you can be sure that your family is protected from mature and adult content.
Net Nanny offers a variety of product options, including a Single Device package for Windows or Mac OS X, as well as an option to bundle licenses for multiple devices with Family Protection Passes for 5 devices or 10 devices.
The annual retail price of Net Nanny depends on which package you purchase. If your family needs solutions for multiple devices for your family, consider purchasing a Family Protection Pass for either 5 or 10 device licenses.
Net Nanny offers a variety of product options, including a Single Device package for Windows desktops or laptops, as well as an option to bundle licenses for multiple devices and device types with Family Protection Passes for 5 devices or 20 devices.
The annual retail price of Net Nanny depends on which package you purchase. If your family needs solutions for multiple devices for your family, consider purchasing a Family Protection Pass for either 5 or 20 device licenses.
To upgrade, customers may log in to their Net Nanny Parent Dashboard or contact Customer Service for assistance at sup...@netnanny.com or by chatting live at between 10am and 7pm EST Monday through Friday.
Hayden Aaron Erlandson testifies in Yakima County Superior Court Thursday, Oct. 20, 2023. Erlandson was charged with attempted second-degree child rape and communicating with a minor for immoral purposes after being arrested in an online sting operation in 2019.
Washington State Patrol Trooper Daniel Mosqueda holds up two condoms that were found on Hayden Aaron Erlandson when he went to a Yakima home to meet with a 13-year-old girl he met online for sex. Mosqueda testified at Erlandson's trial in Yakima County Superior Court Thursday, Oct. 19., 2023.
Deputy Attorney General Theodore Smith questioned why Erlandson was not concerned that he was being told several times by the woman that she was really 13 and he had to wait for her mother to leave the house before he could come over.
Judge Elisabeth Tutsch rejected a motion to throw out the case by Jeffrey B. West, Erlandson's attorney, after a juror found notes in his court-issued notebook from the trial for another man who was arrested in the Net Nanny sting. The pages from the trial of Veniamin Nickolay Gaidaichuk were to have been removed by court staff before reissuing the notepads for the current trial.
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Net Nanny may be one of the oldest names in the parental control software business, but it's kept adding new features, and the latest edition includes tools you won't always see in the younger competition.
Tracking tools include the ability to view the location (and location history) of all your children on a single map. Net Nanny has added geofencing support, too, allowing you to define important locations (home, school, grandma's, whatever you need) and get alerts when a child leaves or arrives.
Support for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Kindle Fire ensures you can run Net Nanny just about anywhere. Keep in mind that features vary depending on the platform - Windows and Mac laptops don't support location tracking, for instance. That's an issue with all parental control apps, though, and the ability to offer even partial protection on desktops is still a major plus point.
(As we write, the company says these prices are discounted, with '30% off for a limited time.' A quick visit to the Wayback Machine showed Net Nanny offering the same prices six months ago, though, so it doesn't seem that limited. Still, it's possible the prices will be significantly higher by the time you read this.)
That's not an unusual price for Net Nanny's level of features. Bark also uses text analysis to spot issues with web content but isn't as successful as Net Nanny, and it costs a similar $99 a year to cover unlimited devices.
There are significantly cheaper apps around, though. Kaspersky Safe Kids doesn't have the real-time content filtering you'll get with Net Nanny, but it more than covers the parental controls basics, and it costs just $15 to protect unlimited devices for a year.
Net Nanny's trial scheme isn't exactly clear. The website explains you get 14 free days with the Android app, for instance, then we installed it and were offered three. Even just a day or two is better than nothing, though, and even if you sign up and regret it, you can still ask for a refund within the first 14 days.
Net Nanny's setup process began when we installed the parent's app. We entered our email address and chose a password to create an account, selected the free three-day trial, and the app launched a wizard to help us begin.
This can look a little intimidating, but there's a plus in NetNanny's live chat support (Monday to Friday, 10am to 7pm EST.) It's not 24/7, but it beats many smaller companies, which often provide support via email only. It was also good to see the company send us an email with more instructions, so even if we had to give up on our current session, we'd have guidance on what to do next.
This prompted us to log in and create our child's basic profile - name, gender and age - and then walked us through the process of approving various Android permissions (device administrator, location, content checking.) There are a lot, but they're necessary for parental control apps, where you're keeping a very close eye on how a device is being used.
Finally, Net Nanny prompted us to manually enable Safe Search in the Google app. That's good advice, but many apps do this automatically, and some do the same with other search engines (Kaspersky can enforce Safe Search with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.)
The Safe Search setting isn't protected, either, so your child could simply disable it later. That's not automatically a disaster, as even if your child finds dubious content in a search, it should be blocked by Net Nanny's filter, but it's still a weakness in the system.
Net Nanny gave our test 9-year-old unlimited screen time by default, but that's easy to change. We were able to set separate usage time limits for every day of the week, and with a precise number of minutes each time (many apps support only 15 or 30-minute increments, and Mobicip schedules usage time in one-hour blocks only.)
We couldn't initially find any way to schedule specific times when a device could be used, for example, to block device access from bedtime until the morning. The Help site pointed us in the right direction: for some reason, Net Nanny places time scheduling in an entirely different area of the control panel, doesn't link them, and doesn't highlight the feature later (it's the bottom option of a drop-down list.)
Once you find it, though, the scheduler works more or less as expected, allowing you to allow or deny internet access in one-hour blocks throughout the day. Many apps only support a single range ('8am to 9pm'), but Net Nanny's approach gives you far more control, for example allowing you to deny device use at mealtimes (5-6pm) and restore it for an hour or two afterward.
Most parental control apps filter web content using blacklists and whitelists, but Net Nanny is much smarter. Real-time text analysis looks for dubious content as it's accessed, giving the app a chance of blocking even brand new dangers. And Net Nanny even takes account of context, enabling it to tell the difference between a Wikipedia article that references drugs in a responsible and relevant way, and a site that really, really doesn't.
Net Nanny's content filtering can be customized using 14 categories: Drugs, Porn, Suicide, Weapons and more. Each category has three settings: always block, always allow, or an intermediate 'alert' (the child can access the content, but you'll be warned they've done so.)
You can also add custom filters that block content including a specific keyword or phrase. That gives you a lot of control but could block some worthwhile sites, as you won't fully benefit from Net Nanny's context-sensitive analysis. Adding 'suicide' or 'self-harm' might prevent access to genuinely dangerous forums, for instance, but may also block access to useful mental health resources.
If you need more control, Net Nanny supports building your own custom lists of sites it'll always allow, or always block. That's particularly handy if your child finds a blocked site she thinks should be available. Tap 'Request Access' in the child's app, the parent app raises an alert, and if it looks reasonable, you can add the site to the child's whitelist with a tap.
Although this worked as expected, Net Nanny's child app crashed a couple of times during the review, leaving us to access whatever sites we like. That might be an issue relating to our specific device or its setup, but it's an issue we've not seen with other providers, and has to be a concern.
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