AT&T turns parents into big brother
Smart Limits is a new Web portal for AT&T's parental controls scheme, but does it work?
AT&T rolled out a new security portal today called Smart Limits. Designed for parents who want to monitor all aspects of their children's activities, the site provides instructions for parental controls of the Internet, cellular phones, television watching, and regular landline telephone calls. There is one catch, though: all the information is for AT&T's services, so it's not going to work on your Comcast cable box or Verizon cell phone.
There's obviously a big push for parental controls, as Windows Vista and Web services like MySpace recently have pushed out new child protection initiatives. Instead of a Web site telling you how to access and monitor these controls in the individual services, I'd like to see AT&T put together a site that would allow you to control and manage all these services remotely. Combine that with Inilex for your car, and your kids will do nothing without you knowing.