Protecting your young children from hate and adult websites
Ellen Whyte, Contributor, Malaysia, ellenwhyte@lepak.com
Excellent for entertainment and homework help, a computer with Internet access is now a regular household feature. While each country has laws governing the type of material publicly available, content on the World Wide Web (WWW) is much harder to censor.
The lack of universal regulatory bodies mean certain corners of cyberspace offer materials many adults agree are not for the very young. These include pornographic and hate sites as well as material that advocates extreme religious or political viewpoints, encourages gambling, drug taking and eating disorders. Shielding your child from sites you don't consider suitable can be quite a job.
Double meanings and disguises
Search engines and directories are common tools used to identify WWW content but keyword double meanings and intended disguises adopted by unscrupulous companies can cause havoc with your search.
Some keywords have double meanings as one friend searching for Little Women found out when looking for articles discussing Louise Alcott's classic book. Occasionally, even the most unexceptional terms can yield embarrassing results. This is due to unscrupulous vendors who lure visitors by adopting a disguise, describing their pornographic site as one selling ceramics for example.
Another popular disguise is to buy over popular domain names or register domain names that inspire confidence because of their association. Plenty of visitors who confuse whitehouse.com with whitehouse.gov are surprised not to find the expected U.S. government notices. Legal action is sometimes taken but as these underhand practices remain common, one has to assume that they pay off well enough to make it worthwhile.
Filtering Software
Supervision is the key to security but hours of watching someone surf can be too much for even the most dedicated parent. Some invest in censorware, also known as blocking or filtering programs. Popular products are Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sentinel, Cyber Snoop, Cybersitter and Net Nanny. These tools scan each page before it appears on your screen, checking content against a list of taboo sites and keywords. If the page is deemed unsuitable, the program won't let it download. This software may also provide logs of visited sites and prevent personal information from being given out.
Privacy issues apart, censorware tends to be tricky. Text filtering ignores the context, which leads to problems. One example that is often cited is the bias against the word breast.
Should your software deem this to be a taboo word, your child will not be able to read chicken breast recipes or check up on breast cancer reports. Ban the word tit and budding ornithologists will be frustrated in their search for information. Guarding against hate sites is just as difficult as the vocabulary used is not always vulgar.
Furthermore, customization limits vary from product to product. Some manufacturers will reveal what sites and words they have listed as forbidden but others hide this information. If you don't agree with your manufacturer's choices or values, and you are not able to change their settings, you won't be happy with the decisions their software takes on your behalf.
Another important point is that technology is not yet at the stage where images can be checked for content. This means that censorware cannot tell pornographic images from family photos and that anyone sending offensive text may choose to do so in an image file rather than a text file. If you use websites that offer e-mail, chat and direct messaging services targeted by "hit and run" merchants sending out adult-oriented images to users this limitation can be particularly important.
Ultimately, the success of censorware also depends on cooperation. Considering that it takes a child a moment to figure out how to use the latest DVD machine without reading instructions, it is conceivable that those who want to look at "forbidden" resources will learn to circumnavigate censorware - or visit a friend or Internet cafe where such restrictions don't apply!
Gotcha!
Anyone surfing the Net is at risk of seeing material they would rather not. Adults can rationalize this, but children may think they are to blame for being at a "naughty" website. Making your restrictions clear with a frank discussion of what is and is not appropriate plus regular reviews of acceptable boundaries as the children matures is an excellent first step.
It is also useful to ask to be told immediately about problems. This allows you to use the backspace button to see how the site was reached and to turn the experience into a positive one by explaining how the error occurred. This will also help your child to learn to recognize the more common telltale signs.
Safe surfing!