Filtering

What is filtering?

Filtering is the process of controlling access to the Internet by analyzing the incoming and outgoing information. A filter lets the information pass, or not pass, based on some criteria.

For example a filter that is sometimes used on photographs will look at the amount flesh colour in the photograph. If there is too much flesh colour (a possible indication of a pornographic image) it will stop the photograph being displayed. Filtering however is never perfect. Somebody who was using this filtering service went to the webcam on the top of Everest at sunset and found that it was blocked because there was 'too much nudity'.

Most search engines have their own filtering service which can be switched on and off by a parent and can be password controlled. Below is the AltaVista Home page.

You can access the filtering area by clicking on 'Settings'. Then click on 'Family Filter'. It is here that you can control access to undesirable sites and also password-protect your decisions.

Unfortunately it is not possible to set up a password-protected filtering system in Google.

Below is a list of the common search engines and information on whether they have password controlled filtering.

Search engine	Web address	Password filtering
Google	www.google.co.uk	No
AltaVista	www.altavista.com	Yes
Yahoo	uk.yahoo.com	No
Teoma	www.teoma.com	No
Dogpile	www.dogpile.com	Can set preferences but not password protected
Ask Jeeves	www.ask.com	No
Ask Jeeves Kids	Ajkids.com	Yes. Automatic protection
Web Crawler	www.webcrawler.com	Can set preferences but not password protected
Yahooligans	www.yahooligans.com	Yes automatic protection

Thinking of a password.

It is sometimes difficult to think of a password that the children will not know and one that you will remember. Here is a quick way of creating an original password that is easy to remember.

Think of a sentence of at least 8 words that you will be able to remember. It could be:
"I think the car needs washing on Sunday"

Now take the first letter from each word in the sentence. This gives:

ittcnwos

If you now replace the letter 't' with the number '1' the password becomes:

i11cnwos

A truly unique password.

To filter or not to filter.

No filtering process is 100% perfect. With the Internet and World Wide Web being so big there is always a chance that that innocently named web site that contains undesirable material will be accessible by the children. There is also the issue of age. When do you allow a child open access to the Internet? These are very personal decisions.

As parents you should consider the following points:

You need to take a very careful look at what your children are doing on the home or library computer. You must talk to the children about what they are doing. How did you get to that page? Do you know who put that on the Internet? Do you know who you are playing that online game with? Learn about the Internet with your children

To help in this process make sure that the computer screen is always visible to you. Keep the computer in a family room. It shouldn't be facing a wall or be behind closed doors.

Again you should constantly be having a dialogue with children about the types of images and written work that they may meet on the Internet. Undesirable images are the most common offence however there are some very undesirable sections of text on the Internet which could cause considerable offence and the children in their innocence may believe it. For example there is a site innocently labelled 'Home Web page of Arthur R. Butz' at http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz where he seems to claim in an authoritarian way that the Nazi holocaust did not happen. A child reading this in an uncritical way could be convinced by the arguments.

Age and filtering are very personal decisions. It will depend a lot upon the discussions you have had with your children about inappropriate material. Eventually the child will have to make his/her decisions about access.

More information on safety in chat rooms is included in the Chat room problems and the Talking to your children units.

 

 

 

Return to top