  For parents of young children and adolescents, the digital age has introduced
many new challenges, including excessive screen time, inappropriate online
content, cyber predators, and cyberbullying. To address these challenges, many
parents rely on numerous parental control solutions on different platforms,
including parental control network devices (e.g., WiFi routers) and software
applications on mobile devices and laptops. While these parental control
solutions may help digital parenting, they may also introduce serious security
and privacy risks to children and parents, due to their elevated privileges and
having access to a significant amount of privacy-sensitive data. In this paper,
we present an experimental framework for systematically evaluating security and
privacy issues in parental control software and hardware solutions. Using the
developed framework, we provide the first comprehensive study of parental
control tools on multiple platforms including network devices, Windows
applications, Chrome extensions and Android apps. Our analysis uncovers
pervasive security and privacy issues that can lead to leakage of private
information, and/or allow an adversary to fully control the parental control
solution, and thereby may directly aid cyberbullying and cyber predators.
