More power to you, parents. Amazon’s Fire Kids Edition tablets are all set to get better as the company improves the parental dashboard features. The facility launched last year has been upgraded so that parents can access and impose restrictions on their children’s tablets sitting anywhere. To know what their children are up to, parents can have access from any smartphone or PC and adjust settings like screen time limits, bedtime curfews, whitelisted apps and more. The dashboard had systematically categorised how much time, in terms of minutes, the kids spend on different activities – like reading books, using apps, watching videos and so on — on their tablets. To reassure things, there is an activity card on daily, weekly and monthly basis.
The new feature follows Amazon’s launch of discussion cards, the conversation points related to the apps. The addition is treated as an early-bird strategy to fight possible competition in future from Apple and Google in the same area. The dashboard is exclusively for parents who own a Fire 7 Kids Edition or Fire 8 Kids Edition.
Meanwhile, the children are not happy with getting more restrictions imposed on them, points out Gizmodo, a portal that writes on technology. Preliminary research from University of Central Florida surveyed 200 pairs of parents and children (from age 13 to 17). “They found that parents who relied on these apps were more likely to be stricter and authoritarian. The teens whose parents reported having these apps were also more likely to report being exposed to unwanted explicit content, online harassment and problems with other kids,” the report on Gizmodo reads.
