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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!
Hybrid filtering: BrowseSafe's PlanetGood (Sept. 10, '99 issue)
First, our standard caveat: There are many Net safety tools on the market - filtering, monitoring, kids' browsers, filtering ISPs, ratings systems, etc. You can read about them at GetNetWise.org (we're on the Advisory Board). We don't recommend them per se, because it's an individual family decision - what tools to use and whether to use them at all. But we will let you know about trends, technologies, and individual products when we think they're worth your consideration.
This week we spoke with the makers of PlanetGood. We think you should know about it because it's a trailblazer. It doesn't fit any familiar categories - it's not just a kid browser, not filter or blocking software, not a filtered Internet service provider, not a site rating system - but, in a creative way, PlanetGood combines all those things. And its makers, an Indianapolis-based company called BrowseSafe, very handily hands over to parents all judgment on what is/isn't appropriate Web content for kids.
Just how do they do that? you might ask. They punt. Really. But let us explain: BrowseSafe has 30 parent-and-educator Web site reviewers who, CEO Mark Smith says, have analyzed 200,000 of the nearly 800,000 sites on the Web, at a rate of 9,000 sites a week. Their goal is to reach the review rate of 15,000 sites a week by next month (we'll come back to this ambition). But they don't pass judgment on any site - they let parents decide what kinds of material their kids can access. They do that by simply organizing the sites (even sections of sites that have, say, chat or gambling or e-commerce) into about 35 content categories. These are standard-issue categories like gambling, violence, profanity, and nudity and more refined ones like art nudity, medical anatomy, and medical sexual terminology - but more numerous and detailed than, say, a movie rating system.
As for pornography, it's simply blocked for any PlanetGood customer. Mark says the company has a database of more than 100,000 pornography sites which is continuously updated and which grows by 1,000s of sites a week. The company's servers automatically block these. From there, parents can make the product more restrictive, depending on age/maturity levels in their home.
The system really works a lot like the US's movie-rating system - and illustrates nicely how an international Web ratings system should work. Parents decide if "PG-13" or "R" is right for their child. The difference is, movie studios voluntarily rate films; not enough of the zillions of Web sites do. The reason why the US's Internet ratings systems don't work is because compliance isn't yet universal. So BrowseSafe has taken it upon itself to do the ratings. What makes its effort more feasible than others is a technology the company has that tells users when they've happened upon a site that hasn't been rated yet. With it, they can click a "Submit" button that sends a review request to the BrowseSafe server (sites are usually rated within 24 hours, Mark says). With this Submit technology, BrowseSafe's own customers actually help the company keep up.
Here's how PlanetGood works: For $5 a month (added to a family's Internet service provider's fee), users receive a CD that piggybacks on their preferred browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator/Communicator. They dialup to their ISP, and - when they go out on the Web - their PlanetGood browser sends them through its company servers. It's the servers at BrowseSafe that block pornography as well as all the other content parents have "told" the browser they don't want to see. The PlanetGood browser has three levels (with their own passwords) for which parents can configure what's acceptable: "PlanetWow!" for kids 10 and under, "PlanetCool!" for 11-to-16-year-olds, and "PlanetHome!" for everybody else. A new feature, PlanetStealth, which includes security against kids' efforts to hack the system, CEO Mark says, also allows parents to control what Internet technologies kids can access: chat programs, audio and video players, other browsers, etc.
Getting back to the numbers - BrowseSafe's ambitious goal of keeping pace with all the new Web sites going online each day. Few toolmakers would tackle the daunting task of reviewing them all. Most rely solely on "spider" technology that continuously "crawls" through Web sites looking for keywords like "sex" or "bombs," then blocking sites containing those words. PlanetGood uses it, too, to find new sites, but for the end-user focuses more on its reviewing process because, Mark says, technology can't be as discerning as human reviewers are.
But what about keeping up with the Web's growth? we asked. "It is only a matter of time and people. Our Submit technology is unique to the industry and is the fastest way to incorporate new sites, as well as sites our customers want to view most. In fact, the most popular sites, where most of the Internet audience spends most of its time, have already been reviewed!" We hope it gets easier for them, because we like efforts to categorize Web content so parents can decide what works for their own children.
To keep him on his toes, we also asked Mark if, by going through an extra server, surfers get slowed down. He answered: "Technically yes and then maybe no ... let me explain. It is true that the user is slowed by a few hundred milliseconds (100 milliseconds = 1/10 of a second) to pass through our system, however, this fraction of a second is countered by having sites cached on our system and by technology that transmits data through the shortest available path - something most ISPs do not offer. In reality, using a modem or higher bandwidth utilities, the user doesn't see any noticeable difference in speed, one way or the other."
So what's different about this product/service is its philosophy (give the judgment to parents, like any good ratings system), its goals (actually rate all the sites on the Web!), the technologies it combines (the usual Web-crawler one many filters use and its own user-submit technology), and the way it works (users go out on the Web through an ISP and BrowseSafe's servers). That's why we think it's breaking new ground.
If any of you try PlanetGood, tell us what you think. If you're happy with another product, or you don't believe in filtering or ratings at all, we'd love to hear about it - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
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