New Device Tracks Your Kids Online Activity When You Can’t

A new device that connects to your home Wi-Fi router will track and can limit the amount of time family members spend on a particular website, acting as a sort of watchdog for children’s online habits, the company said.

Circle with Disney is a $99 device that connects right to your router to help monitor the activity of every device connected to your home network, including your home computer and smart TV, as well as any personal devices, like smartphones and tablets.

So, for parents concerned their child is spending too much time on Facebook, or maybe has concerns over whom their child is speaking to on the social networking site, Circle with Disney will help track their kid’s usage and help parents set limits on how long a user can stay on a particular website.

The idea, according to PC World, is “not to spy on your family’s online activity. Instead the goal is to set limits on what your children can access online, when they can access it, and for how long. Circle with Disney allows a parent to associate devices on a home network with individual family members. Then they can decide how long that person or device can be online and what services can be accessed.”

Circle is able to limit a child’s time on Facebook or YouTube, for instance, to one hour a day and accumulates that time across all devices, so parents can know little Sally or Billy is only on Facebook one hour per day, instead of sneakily checking their phone every five minutes under the dinner table.

The device also allows “bedtimes” and “wake up times” for individual devices or people to help prevent usage when your child should be sleeping or doing homework.

Circle with Disney is available now. The activity tracker is available as an iOS app, Circle Home. Circle hopes to bring its app to Android sometime in 2016.