Updated on: September 12, 2024
It’s hard for everyday people like me and you to remain on top of new cybersecurity threats and complex concepts while trying to protect our online privacy and digital rights without giving up the convenience of our favorite apps and technologies.
In this interview series by Safety Detectives, I talk to cybersecurity experts and thought leaders who share insights, actionable tips and future predictions that will help us better understand what is really going on with our data and protect your digital life more effectively without losing your sanity.
Olena Barilo is the Founder and Director of HT Vector, a software company that has developed several intuitive and secure apps for parental control, internet filtering, productivity management, and tracking. So far their apps have been installed 4 million times in 150 countries.
What are the most overlooked cyber threats that you see affecting consumers in your industry? What makes threats particularly concerning?
While I’m not deeply involved in other areas, I can confidently address issues related to child online protection and combating digital distractions. At HT Vector Soft, we design parental controls and time management apps, and since most of our team members are parents, we are deeply committed to protecting children. Our primary focus is on ensuring that our apps shield children from adult content, violence, and other harmful material that can damage their psyche and cause lasting harm.
I once watched a film that deeply moved me. In it, children had no restrictions on the content they could access and ended up on pornographic sites, which caused them deep psychological trauma. As they grew older, they faced serious psychological issues related to this, which significantly affected their lives. Therefore, our primary goal is to protect children from online threats that can harm their mental health.
HT Vector software allows blocking or limiting in time about 15 different categories of sites/apps that you consider undesirable for your child or for productivity. Each category contains thousands of sites and keywords, which we regularly update. We are also continuously adding more languages to our program to block harmful sites in many languages.
Our second goal is to promote healthy computer usage habits to prevent computer addiction. Our programs can set time limits for computer use—screen time, any site, and apps—and everything is designed to be flexible so that parents can fully customize the program to meet their child’s specific needs. For instance, parents can limit computer time to a certain number of hours a day or set a schedule. They can even allow their child to use the computer for only a certain amount of time per hour, encouraging them to take breaks instead of becoming engrossed in games, videos, social media, and other online distractions that are so alluring to children.
This approach encourages children to live a real life, which is much better than a virtual one. Real games, paper books, fresh air, sunshine, and physical activity are what childhood should be about. These experiences create memories that will form the most cherished parts of their lives, providing them with a sense of a complete childhood and a fulfilling life. No computer activity can give it.
This is what is truly valuable and dear to us, and this is what we offer to parents through our HT Family Shield or HT Parental Controls.
What are the best ways to prevent and react to these threats?
Parents should first recognize that their child needs protection online because they cannot do it themselves. Children can easily come across shocking content or be unable to tear themselves away from video games. This is one of the most important tasks for parents.
For example, some of our subscribers pause their subscriptions during the summer when their child isn’t in school. But that doesn’t mean that during the summer, the child can’t stumble upon shocking content or spend eight hours a day glued to gadgets when they should be developing physically and mentally away from the computer. Parents should realize this.
The same goes for adults. They first need to acknowledge the problem and then desire to address it. This is not always about dependence. Many of our customers who use HT Work Focus or HT Task Vector do not have a dependency but struggle with procrastination, or sometimes they find it difficult to focus on work because many sites are designed to keep them as long as possible—social networks, videos, even news. These sites don’t care if you work or study, but you do. It would be great to have a digital assistant that alerts you to this.
Arm yourself with the right tools
The second step is to use a genuinely effective app—not just one that is heavily advertised—that can assist you in this endeavor. It’s crucial to be confident in the program you’ve chosen. You need to personally verify how each feature functions and observe its performance in real-world scenarios.
How you test the app and how your child attempts to bypass it to access forbidden games or videos are two entirely different things. I sometimes joke that if we were developing something like a graphic editor—software that doesn’t need to outsmart children—my job would be much easier. But, as with any joke, there’s a grain of truth in it.
Parental control software is one of the most challenging to develop, not just because we have to keep up with constantly evolving online threats, but also because we have to anticipate the ways children will try to bypass the controls meant to protect them. Perhaps only pediatricians have a tougher job—they would certainly understand what I’m talking about.
Get actively involved
The third step is your personal involvement. You can’t just install parental control software and forget about it, assuming that everything is under control. That’s not how it works. You need to review logs, ensure that the program is working as expected, and do what you intended. And not just once a month—at least once every few days.
You should talk to your child, explaining that using the parental control program is for their benefit, not because you’re a strict parent who doesn’t want them to have fun. It’s important to convey that their mental and physical health is more important than any game or website. In order to develop, they need to take breaks from the computer. And that this is truly important to YOU as a parent because you want them to be happy and healthy.
Awareness of the need for online protection, a reliable and well-tested program, and parental involvement are the keys to success, and only together can they work effectively.
What are the crucial things people should STOP or START doing today to improve the safety of their data?
As I mentioned, it’s about recognizing the problem and wanting to address it. Also, using a reliable and tested control program that works for you, not just one recommended by an advertisement. That’s why we offer our clients a 14-day free trial version where they can personally test all the functions and see how reliably they work.
So yes, we recommend using our programs as a helpful tool. However, we don’t encourage relying solely on parental control apps, thinking that once set up, everything will be fine. No program in the world can guarantee 100% protection. If someone promises you that, stay away.
For instance, with pornographic sites, do parents know how many new porn sites appear every single day? Hundreds appear daily. Fortunately, our program handles this by checking keywords on websites, but even this is not foolproof.
Another example is when parents set time limits on the computer or restrict access to certain sites and programs. But the child may not agree with this and will try anything—whether by themselves, by turning to forums, or by asking older friends—to bypass these restrictions.
In such cases, parents often blame the parental control program. But if they were a little more involved, checked our program reports, and read our security tips—which we conveniently highlighted and posted on one of the program’s pages—it would be impossible.
For example, many parents give their children administrative rights, which allows them to do anything, and at the same time, they believe that parental controls cannot be overridden with admin rights. Yes, this works in most cases, but there are always children, especially teenagers, who know gadgets better than their parents, much better, and if given the right to do anything with an administrator account, no program can provide a 100% guarantee.
What emerging technologies, trends, and new threats do you believe will have a great impact in the next 5-10 years? How do you plan to adapt to these changes?
As a mother, it concerns me that children are becoming more and more dependent on gadgets. Even when children play together, they might pull out a phone, and their playtime becomes about completing some quest or activity on the phone.
They won’t ask each other about how they’re doing or learn more about their friends. They don’t jump or run around anymore. It’s sad. Our children will never have the kind of childhood we had without all this. But we can still make a difference and promote a more active life away from gadgets.
As an expert in parental control, I can say that at HT Vector, we do everything we can to help parents in their challenging mission. We are constantly improving our programs, making them more reliable, complex, and flexible in settings so they align with each family’s values.
We continuously receive feedback on what our clients want, and we implement those ideas. Currently, I have a list of 50 ideas for improving our programs, many of which were suggested by our parent clients. One recent example is the remaining time timer.
Children nowadays are even more nervous, and when a program blocks a game after a child has spent an hour on it, it can lead to a scandal with tears and accusations. So, the brilliant idea was to show a timer half an hour before the blocking happens. We haven’t seen this feature in other parental control programs, but it’s great. When a child knows exactly how much time is left for online entertainment, they won’t throw a tantrum but will calmly accept it. This feature has saved a lot of nerves for our parents, their children, and myself as a mother.
The key is the commitment to continuous development and increasing our utility. At HT Vector, we are dedicated to being genuinely helpful. Receiving positive feedback on how our programs have assisted people and, in some cases, even transformed their lives for the better, is the greatest motivation for us to keep striving for improvement.
A smile on the face of a child playing outside with their friend or parents, rather than sitting in front of a screen all the time, is our greatest reward.
How can our readers follow your work?
Website: https://ht-vector.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/htvector