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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!
Dotsafe: Filtered ISP for schools & homes (Oct. 22, '99 issue)
Dotsafe made a bold announcement a couple of weeks ago: Free Internet filtering for any school in the US. That got our attention! For the 89% of schools already connected, that means no change to existing Internet service - just filtering added to it, plus free email addresses for all students (like johnnysmith@mhs.dotsafe.net).
That's an important offer in its own right (and we're wondering how other institutional filtering services, requiring fees, are going to keep up). We'll tell you why we think it'll work in a second, but first you should know that schools are not Dotsafe's primary market. Homes are. Dotsafe has put together the infrastructure it needs to provide filtered dial-up Internet service to homes nationwide for $19.95 a month (high-speed DSL service coming soon). So they're going for a very big universe.
Now we'll tell you why we think their filtering will make sense to that large universe, particularly schools (at least, the schools that don't already have competitor N2H2). The answer in a nutshell: Their filtering philosophy. That was one of the first questions we asked Dotsafe CEO Robert Maynard, and his answer seemed to jive well with what school librarians would want: "If you don't see it in the New York Times, a news magazine, a school library, or on network news, you won't see it on the Internet," he said, referring to the Dotsafe Internet experience.
The goal is to "civilize the Internet," Robert said, make the Net (or Dotsafe's filtered version of it) a PG-13 experience, as safe and predictable as the mass media in this country (well, generally predictable). Is Hustler magazine publicly accessible to children? No. So it's filtered. Is Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition or Victoria's Secret? Yes. They're not filtered. Bomb-making sites, suicide sites, sites with recipes for illegal drugs are filtered by Dotsafe. For public schools, the important point that emerges from all this is: no political or religious agenda.
True, school administrators, tech coordinators, librarians, parents won't be able to customize the filtering much, but that's the idea - to keep the filtering criteria so simple and transparent that they won't need to. And Robert says his research shows that they don't want to. People just want peace of mind without having to learn any new technology (kids are a different story!).
Blocking Web sites, however, is the easy part, Robert told us. The hard part, the one they're working on right now, is making online chat safe for kids. Schools generally don't allow chat. Dotsafe says research says schools generally use the Net for two things right now: primarily to teach Internet skills, secondarily for students to do research. So chat isn't part of the free service Dotsafe offers schools. But it's definitely part of the home market, the revenue-producing side of the business.
What Dotsafe is doing right now for chat is letting its customers go to safe chat for kids, such as FreeZone, Headbone Zone, and i-SAFE, as well as Yahoo! chat. Since Yahoo! chat is definitely not always safe, Dotsafe says, it has a screen, warning of potential danger, that pops up whenever a customer clicks into Yahoo! chat.
That's the stopgap measure, we're told. In beta-testing right now is technology that will be "listening on all ports," looking for dangerous situations, or key words and strings of data (such as a child's phone number) indicating danger in customers' chat sessions. The technology will "whisper" into a customer's ear (via instant messaging) that s/he is getting into a situation that isn't safe. It will also block profanity and sexual material in real time (though, Dotsafe says, this can't be fool-proof). The company also plans to create its own chat environments where chat will be monitored by people all the time, 7x24.
Then there's email. That will be filtered too. Dotsafe says it will block "porn spam," sex-related unsolicited email, as well as regular email containing inappropriate language and attachments over a certain size. Filtered instant messaging is due to be added by sometime in the spring.
Coming back around to why this is a new benchmark for Internet filtering…. Whenever you have filtering, behind it you have somebody's filtering criteria. Those criteria for what gets filtered come from somebody's value system - usually that of the filtering company or some generally accepted set of standards it adopted. Anybody who buys that product or service should probably find out what the criteria are to see if they fit the values of their family, school district, or library system. If the criteria are stated right up front to be those of what's generally acceptable in the US's public media for presentation to children, filtering customers won't have a lot of digging or customizing to do. Now, those criteria certainly won't be acceptable to everyone - for more conservative families there are a number of filtered ISPs to check out (keep reading). But public institutions that serve children may be a step closer to resolving the widely publicized conflict between filtering and free speech on the Internet. We'll now turn this over to the debaters of that tricky issue!
Meanwhile, though there's still no getting around the need for hands-on online-parenting, good companies and technology are making it easier for us. But what do you think about filtering for kids, and what are you looking for in a filtering product or service? Do email us your thoughts - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
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