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Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
Kidsnet and Netopia: Fresh tech options for parent (April 9, '04 issue)
For parents looking for tech tools to help keep kids' Net use constructive, two new services are worth your attention: Netopia for broadband users and Kidsnet for anybody (with a Windows PC). We interviewed executives at both companies and liked what we heard. [We do not have the resources to test these resources, so we publish these product alerts because of: 1) what we know of family online-safety needs and 2) what we like about the companies' claims and product features.]
Both Kidsnet and Netopia seem pleasantly focused on two key things for families: ease of use and flexibility. Both offer multiple accounts per family - Kidsnet six, Netopia "seven or eight." Both provide remote access, so Mom or Dad can change settings or check in on latchkey Net surfers from work or the road. Kidsnet launched about a year ago, Netopia right around now!
Each is agnostic in its own way. Kidsnet isn't connection speed-specific - dialup or broadband are both fine. Netopia is "agnostic for the desktop." Its technology "lives" in your router and on its own servers, so it works with any box in the house connected to that router - PCs, Macs, even game consoles using Xbox and PlayStation 2 Internet service for gamers (interestingly, the New York Times just reported that Microsoft is increasingly blurring the line between the PC and the game console).
Both services also have huge databases of - remarkably - human-reviewed Web sites (properly trained humans still do a much better job at making judgment calls on child-appropriate content than technology does).
After buying Nielsen/NetRatings's list of sites representing about 98% of all Web traffic, Kidsnet spent about five years training reviewers and categorizing those sites using the Internet Content Rating Association's (ICRA.org's) labeling criteria for violence, drugs, sex, hate, etc. Kidsnet claims now to have a database of 175 million Web pages (2.5 times the size of Yahoo's directory, when they last checked). What we like about Kidsnet's approach - besides the humans behind it up front and ongoing (free semi-annual updates) - is that it offers parents full disclosure of criteria the company uses for blocking sites (unusual in this business) and allows parents to customize by adding and deleting sites. Plus, if a child runs across a site not found in the database, it will be human-reviewed and added to Kidsnet's white list or black list, as appropriate, so the database also grows in a customer-driven way. Another plus for Kidsnet is the kid search engine it put on top of this database - Hazoo.com. No child searching with Hazoo, whether or not s/he's a Kidsnet customer, can stumble upon porn (artistic nudity, yes, if s/he's not a customer or if s/he is Mom or Dad chose not to block artistic nudity).
Netopia uses filtering company Secure Computing's database of "5 million to 10 million" Web sites. That includes the white and black lists of one of the largest and oldest school filtering companies, N2H2, which Secure Computer acquired last fall. Netopia claims a "team of multi-lingual Web analysts looking at thousands of Web sites everyday" (multi-lingual is not something you hear every day - a plus for Netopia - and Spanish, German, and French versions are in the works, we're told). Filtering criteria aren't disclosed, but parents can override them and create their own white or black lists for individual "accounts," or children.
Then there's the all-important kid-communications piece of the puzzle: IM, email, chat, etc. Netopia shines in this area. With chat, instant-messaging, and email, it allows you to block or allow all activity or "create walled garden" for the child. They say that, with the walled garden turned on, your child sees, for example, a different Eudora or Outlook in-box than yours - one with emails only from the approved list of email addresses or screen names. They also claim to capture conversations, so parents can monitor IM or chat (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and eventually VoIP/Net-based phone calls) from work. When we asked, they weren't sure about Internet Relay Chat, which a lot of kids use.
Right now, Kidsnet simply allows parents to turn IM, chat, email, and file- sharing on or off. In development: "our own safe IM and chat" that "will work with AOL, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and IRC." When turned on, it will "prevent kids from installing any other IM package." In a month, Kidsnet will also include a firewall, we were told.
Though PC Magazine likes Cybersitter best of the online-safety products it reviewed, it also liked Kidsnet (Netopia wasn't out yet). And Cybersitter doesn't have the flexibility that both these services have. You can only turn Cybersitter on or off (for all the kids at your house), which made us wonder if the PC Magazine reviewer is a parent!
Cost: Kidsnet $40/year, Netopia hadn't finalized it at this writing, but gave a ballpark $36-60/year.
* * * Other new products in this space
- IM only. If you're looking for a product that just monitors, searches, and logs instant-messaging conversations on home computers, have a look at p2pLog. For $50, it captures both incoming and outgoing messages in AOL, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo Instant Messengers on up to three PCs on a home network hub (NetGear, not Linksys).
- Remote control. Software companies seem to think parents want to control kids' Net experience from work. That's the big selling point with two other products that have come to our attention: iProtectYou at Softforyou.com in North Carolina (free version available at Tucows) and Kid Defender out of Sunnyvale, California.
- Spanish and Portuguese too. This is the first filtering software we've seen out of Brazil: NetFilter. For Europe- and Japan- based filtering companies, see this item from one of our back issues.
