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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!
From our overview of new kinds of online-safety options - and products that represent them - on display at the June '99 Digital Kids conference in San Francisco...
Browsers for kids (June 18, '99 issue)
Two examples are KiddoNet and Surf Monkey. KiddoNet has a "lite" version that is just a kids' browser. The complete version is also an "environment," a pre-installed interactive playground a bit like JuniorNet, probably, that includes games, sing-along audio (with record and playback features), and "Detective" (older kids find clues out on the 'Net, learning about history, geography, etc., as they go). Kids can go only to sites that have been hand-picked by KiddoNet's "educational multimedia experts" or by their parents (who compile a My Favorites list).
Surf Monkey, a free children's browser that folds in SurfWatch filtering, is probably the best-known player in this space. Having launched middle of last year, it's not as new as some of the services we're reviewing here, but the category's too important not to include here. This is a pretty safe service, the safety cops would say. Surf Monkey's thought through many safety issues, with profanity screening for e-mail, pre-approved (by parents) e-mail "buddy lists," monitored chat, no "whispering" (private exchanges) in chat. The only problems we could find is the possibility of having grownups pose as children in signing up for the service, and children's ability to launch a different browser on the same machine for unrestricted surfing.
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