Parents protect teens with increasing diligence now that smartphone use is rising to all-time levels and MMGuardian Parental Control can help parents protect teens.
Adam Greenberg covered MMGuardian’s rise as a New Jersey startup helping parents in NorthJersey.com:
Protect children with phone app
CLIFTON – Evolving technology brings evolving risk, which is why a group of tech-savvy Clifton and Montclair buddies have put together a smart phone application, or app, that helps parents keep closer tabs on their children’s mobile habits.
The app is made deliberately simple for those with little technical proficiency. Parents can easily monitor all activity on an Android-based smart phone and can additionally set customizable rules for how the device is used by downloading and installing the MMGuardian app on the smart phone and setting up some options.
MMGuardian was created by Pervasive Group Inc., which was founded by CEO James Zhou, COO Joel Holl, Paul Grossinger and Richard Bromham in 2012. From then to now Grossinger said the startup is focused foremost on branding and marketing MMGuardian.
Parents can choose to be notified if their child is doing something inappropriate on their phone. An alert will be sent to the parents without the child’s knowledge. Furthermore, the app runs in the background, so the average phone user will not even notice it.
However, for those parents with technological wunderkinds, Grossinger said MMGuardian is constantly being tested against the most clever young minds and is regularly updated to combat tampering and uninstalling.
“We push parents to be open with their kids,” said Grossinger about the ethical and trust issues that may develop between parent and child from installing a monitoring app, “and to have an open line of communication.”
Grossinger likened smart phones to little computers and said, “The problem is that kids aren’t always forthright and they don’t say if they’re being bullied or having any other problems. We want to help parents who feel like they can’t get that information – and there are lots of things kids do that parents end up don’t knowing about.”
One of those things is the establishing of online relationships often spurred by social media websites including Facebook and Snapchat, said Grossinger, who added that many of these exchanges lead to real-time sharing of text, photo or video – occasionally illicit in subject matter.
Where the complications truly arise, Grossinger said, is when minors are involved and that illicit material, which may easily spread across the web for millions to see, becomes a reputation-damaging legal issue for all parties involved.
While the MMGuardian app is currently only available on mobile platforms using the Android operating system, parents are not bound to one device because they can control MMGuardian from nearly any platform via text message commands – such as ‘lock,’ ‘locate’ and ‘alert.’
