As I previously mentioned, I initially tried to allow my son some freedom by having an Internet connected PC in his room. I thought I could properly monitor and control his access using some of the popular Internet child safety tools that are readily available and heavily marketed.
I tried Net Nanny, CYBSERSitter, and finally settled on Norton Family Edition. Yet as you'll see none of them worked completely. (Now granted I haven't done a new evaluation in the past couple of years as to the improvements made to these products but my search in prior years was pretty exhaustive.)
Website Blocking / Content Filtering
The first thing you're trying to prevent is having your child inadvertently or on purpose visit websites they shouldn't (adult oriented sites, blood and gore, etc.) These programs attempt to solve the problem a few different ways.
Rating Systems like ICRA are one attempt by the industry to control adult content. Web site authors must include special tags/keywords on their website. The safety programs then block access to any site with these tags. This places the burden on the web site author and inherently doesn’t work as it assumes porn companies are honorable and will always "tag" their content as adult.
A more promising method is Content Filtering whereby the safety programs attempt to block access to sites based on the site's content. This is accomplished a few different ways:
- URL filtering is where a particular URL or domain name is identified and/or categorized as an objectionable site.
- Keyword filtering is where certain words and phrases are used to trigger the blocking of web sites. Such words might include "sex", "XXX", "porn", "gambling", etc.
URL and Keyword filtering are insufficient, Porn companies WANT you to happen upon their site by porn-napping, cyber-squatting, doorway scams, misspellings, advertising, looping, mouse-trapping, etc.- Dynamic content filtering is where each website's content is evaluated immediately before it is displayed. Dynamic content filtering can use a myriad of ways to evaluate content; object analysis, keyword analysis, source of objects, link analysis, and image recognition. This is relatively new and unproven technology.
Truly a combination of all three is necessary but will never be completely accurate nor sufficient.
I think the following graphic tells the whole story. It's a review of the top selling Content Filters, if you look closely you'll notice something very interesting. Look at the last row, Filtering Effectiveness, note that NONE of them got a perfect 5 out of 5. So your child may still be exposed to undesirable content. The tools are basically admitting that their inherently flawed.
Email / Chat / Instant Messaging
As the statistics showed email is "old school" to most kids. Instead they rely heavily on Instant Messaging tools like Microsoft IM, AIM, Trillian, and the one my kid uses the most, Xfire. And they post messages back and forth on community sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc.
So how do you combat illicit behavior from this messaging tools and online communities? Well some of the filtering tools then and now support time limits on Internet usage, application blocking, etc. However, I found it to be a never ending battle. At the time Norton had controls for instant messenging programs from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo. But it wasn't long till my kid switched to XFire and then Norton couldn't handle it. And I'm sure that as soon as they did then a new tool would be out and my kid would switch to it.
So I went back to the drawing board in search of simpler yet more comprehensive solution. Tomorrow I'll explain what I do now to control / monitor my children's Internet usage.
Curtis S