eKAVACH App : An App Possibly The Parents Need

Some times we need careful observation of the child’s activities with their mobile devices. This eKAVACH App designed to somewhat control the bad habits of the innocent kids. Many a days we have not published anything related to our Android category, we thought to write about eKAVACH App – for various reasons – both good and bad, most importantly information related to the App which are important to know before installing the application. The eKAVACH App is free of cost application but it is not a Free Software, i.e. the source code is not available. It has various paid layers for the (future) clients to avoid using in-App Google Ads.

The Source Code is not available in GitHub or SourceForge in the way we normally use HP Helion OpenStack and other softwares with a valid Free Software License. At the time of checking for this application, we found iOS and Android version of this application.

eKAVACH App and The Concerns of Today™s Parents

Most important concern of most of the parents, specially the middle class Indians is the usage of mobile devices with the rise of Cloud Computing and Social Networking and the unfortunate side effect of adapting and learning the morally bad things. Internet addiction and Facebook addiction are not exactly are sci-fi stories.

It is exactly the methodology we follow for Free Software development – non-Free softwares are not allowed to get installed. Free Softwares with non-Free components are also blocked. Debian GNU/Linux is characteristically not listed among the GNU/Linux operating systems in official Free Software Foundation’s repo.

It was better if there was a 100% Free Software operating system for the mobile devices, unfortunately there is no universally agreeable operating system for the mobile devices with Free Software compatible license – at firmware level, most has spyware or malware function. They do the exact works as often said by Richard Matthew Stallman – the softwares control the users. There is no sources.list file on Android to control the download the attractive applications including interactive games which demands internet connectivity.

The Requirement Of a Solution Like This eKAVACH App

Softwares should not be designed to control any human, as from our Richard Stallman taught Free Software culture. None ever ran surveillance us for learning computing per se. But that view is of us. Typically the mobile devices use the non-Free softwares which includes Android, iOS etc. It is not quite practical to fully deny the usage of mobile devices by the kids, the pre-teens and the teen agers for communication or learning purpose.

We can not predict the behavior, the complex culture among the typical Indian Middle class. It is beyond our capability to run a valid research on them to understand what computing means to these parents and exactly how their kids’ psychology grow. Possibly many of these parents have no idea about Free Software culture. We think the application developer has enough knowledge about both the Free Software culture and valid data of the segment.

Again another question can be raised – why not limit the bandwidth of the Internet connection speed and usage quota to control the amount of web surfing for a given child? The problem in India in current situation around ISP’s is that, the Internet Service Providers provide 100% free usage of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia etc. browsing via their applications or the default web browser.

As there is a possible need of a parental control by some application of these Kid’s web surfing habit and usage of software applications. Most importantly, it uses a kind of location tracking Application (Heartbeat) and this is possibly important for the female kids and teens in India. The app set is available for other countries as well.

Review of the eKAVACH App Features

There are two applications – one needed to be installed on the parent’s mobile device named eKAVACH Parental Control App (search on your device’s App Store like app marketplace) and another on the child’s device named eKAVACH Parental Control Child (search on your the target device’s App Store like app marketplace to install). Together, these app-set can be used in a pseudo-client-server model. The app demands registration on their website.

The application uses a real-time filtering, an application management system to track the usage of the application of the child. The application does a monitoring on child™s online activities and sends real time data via PUSH technology. There is a “safe search” facility available to filter words which can be typed to search.

It can use a single user-id for the entire family; both the father and mother can monitor the usage separately and has the typical user interface of a modern application. It is possible for the parents to regulate the categories of information the child has access to, it can blocking the access to particular website that the parent might feel can be harmful, it can regulate the amount of time the child spends on his/her phone. There is a function tab encourage or discourage the child’s website using behavior.

In the Child™s version of the App, the child will have the option of sending SOS Messages to the parent
Monitoring the child™s online activity, such as the amount of time he/she spends online, categories of the websites the child visited, and more. There is a social media monitoring feature.

The official website is well documented.

eKAVACH App : Our Concerns and Conclusion

The eKAVACH App as an application has features which are definitely rich. But, whether the installation of an application on a teenager child’s device whether can create a serious misunderstanding with the parents within a family or not, we absolutely can not predict.

All monitoring will erase away if the kid is quite smart to read our Reliance 3G Tab rooting guide like hundreds of guides available over the Internet. If operating system is re-installed, no application previously installed will work. So, it is probably not suitable for teens over 13 years of age from an arbitrary idea of the capabilities of human beings. We have doubt whether a mobile device can actually be abused by a kid of 5 years to 9 years. A mobile application possibly can never change a human behavior. Again – the application, from development point of view is good.

Most funny would be if the kid overtrump the parents by secretly changing the settings from parents’ device or completely uninstall it! From the App’s review page – we can see some parents are complaining of not receiving the data. The problem, we guess is for manipulation of the child app by the “kid” to block the data collection.

There is some obvious theoretical security risk of data theft from both the applications as they gather the usage data possibly with higher privilege and use third party servers. We would recommend not to keep any confidential data related to banking on the devices on which this application is running. After the usage period is over, the device’s operating system is recommended by us to be freshly re-installed. eKAVACH App is a closed source application and honestly we can not give warranty about the possibly of security flaws and possibly of security breech. This matter is between the reader who will use the app and the application developer.

The application possibly is good for a certain limited age group as free application. There are hardware key loggers are available for the “bigger kids”. There are moral matters which are out of scope of our website to discuss about. There can counter argument – prohibiting to use social network just before examination eventually will do better for the kid.