How To Use Your Blackberry Parental Control and Peace of Mind.

Originally appeared from Blackberry Help Blog.

It’s no secret that BlackBerry® smartphones
are known for their security. It’s baked deep
into our BlackBerry OS DNA, and many
features of the Blackberry Smartphone experience can be customized and managed
by BlackBerry® Enterprise Servers and their administrators.
You might not think it obvious, but one
segment of customers that can benefit from
BlackBerry security are teens – they may even
be children – with phones provided by their
parents or guardian. You can see the parallels
here with the Enterprise market – IT is now
mom, and the Enterprise user is now little
Jimmy.
If you provide a BlackBerry smartphone to a
teen or child, you may want to set limits on
what features or services your child has
access to. We see there’s an opportunity here
for us to leverage our expertise in security
and manageability to help parents.
With this in mind, we developed Parental
Controls, which is included in the
BlackBerry® 7.1 OS that’s being rolled out
with our new BlackBerry® Curve™
smartphones (9320 and 9220). Parental
Controls is an integrated feature that provides
parents and guardians simple options to help
them protect their children by restricting
access to specific functions, features and
applications. A free download of Parental
Controls will be made available for
BlackBerry® 7.0 OS and BlackBerry® 6 OS
next month; and for BlackBerry® Device
Software 5.0 shortly after through the
BlackBerry App World™ storefront.
A couple examples of the restrictions you can
set by going to Options -> Security -> Parental
Controls are:
Camera – A control to disable use of the
camera for both still pictures and video.
Upon attempting to launch the Camera
application, the user would be provided
with the message “Camera has been
blocked.”
Phone – Limit the phone to receive calls
only from phone numbers that exist in
the Contacts application. This feature will
block incoming phone calls from
unknown callers.
For more information on all the available
Parental Controls settings, check out the
official user guide.
Research In Motion® (RIM®) is active in a
variety of international organizations
dedicated to making the Internet a safer place
for children. For additional tips to support
your child on how to use their BlackBerry
smartphone safely and responsibly, take a
look at this guide from the UK Safer Internet
Centre.
In addition to Parental Controls, BlackBerry
App World also offers content rating and
filtering options for applications based on the
CTIA Wireless Association’s “Guidelines for
App Content Classification and Ratings”. To
take advantage of this, download the latest
version of BlackBerry App World.
C