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Support:
Basics:
Parents:
Master Control Accounts
Some
of us have children, too, and we understand the difficult
balancing act parents struggle with between protecting their
children from online dangers and respecting their privacy.
For that reason, we recently added Master
Control Accounts
to our offerings.
If at any time, you need additional
explanation or guidance, please email helpdesk at cotse.net
or use our "live
chat" support. Please note that
we will not assist you in invading your child's privacy, as
we believe that children have the right to some privacy,
too. We will, however, try to help you protect your child's
privacy.
Related Files or Site Sections of Special
Interest to Parents:
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Email:
Like some other services or ISPS,
Cotse.Net offers a plan to enable parents to set some
controls for email and web-surfing. Unlike other plans where
the kids usually figure out how to change the settings or
evade them by changing their login name and password, with a
Cotse.Net master
control account, you can add your
family members or friends whose email
accounts will all be filtered according to the rules you set
in the "master" settings, and they will not be able to
override those settings as long as they are using their Cotse account.
As long as you protect your own password
to the master control account so that they can't get it,
only you can set or alter master controls on email. Your
children (or other family members on your list of who's
covered by the rules) will still have some rules and
settings that they can customize and they will still be able
to do certain things, but you can set some
limits or prohibitions. The restrictiveness of the email
rules is up to the master control account holder.
As the master control account manager,
you can also decide whether the rules apply to just your
kids or also to yourself. If you want the same rules to
apply to your own email, then simply add your name to the
list of family members or friends covered by the master
email controls. There is no extra charge for your master
account.
If you want to have different rules for
your email than your children (or friends) covered by the
account do, then don't include yourself in the list and use
your own Cotse account for your mail rules.
Web Surfing:
With a Cotse.Net account, you have a
choice of using any of our three web proxies, or none of
them. If your kids are away at college, they can still have
the protection of our proxy by simply logging in to their
account and using the proxy link from within their account.
Chat:
With a Cotse.Net account, you get a link
to Chat that can be used to take you to our own chat server,
but it can also be used to jump to any other chat server
that accepts a proxy connection. No need for chat software,
and your IP address is protected.
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We believe in being "upfront" with
parents. And although the "can't do" exclusions
also apply to our competitors, we feel that parents need to
be very clear about what we cannot assure:
Although we give you the option to use
highly restrictive email rules such as password-protected
subject lines (whereby a sender's email is not delivered
unless it contains that password phrase as the subject
line), we cannot stop your children from giving out that
password phrase to those you might not wish to have it. Even
if you were to create a goldlist system so only those on the
approved "senders" list could send mail to your children,
there is nothing that stops your child(ren) from suggesting
that someone forge or spoof that approved email address to
send mail to them.
There is no way we can stop your child
from bypassing your rules altogether by creating a free
email account at Hotmail or any other service and then using
that account without your knowledge.
In other words, if your child is bound
and determined to evade your rules and has a little
net-savvy, they can probably get around your system.
Although we give you the instructions to
enable anonymous web surfing through a proxy that blocks
popups and sites and javascript, if your child is on another
computer or understands browser settings, they can evade the
proxy, leaving them unprotected and your privacy
compromised. Again, this is true for our competitors'
products, too.
Even if we give you a way to protect your
IP in chat rooms, we cannot prevent your child from giving
out their -- or your -- personal details.
No system is perfect. Parenting is the
toughest job we know, and we remind all parents that
software is never a complete substitute for parental
supervision and educating your child about the risks.
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