From a Comcast newsletter today:

What’s The Danger?

As a parent, there are two things to be concerned about with the Internet: things you don’t want your kids to see and people you don’t want your kids to meet.

If you’ve spent any time surfing the web, you’ve no doubt stumbled onto sites with kid-inappropriate content. Even an innocent search on common terms that children might use (e.g. Barbie, White House), can lead directly to adult content.

In the early days of the web (just five years ago!), this problem was solved with the installation of “blocking” software. Blocking software does its job by maintaining continually updated lists of “bad sites,” and preventing an Internet browser from visiting any site on the list.

That worked well way back when, however with an estimated 3 billion web sites on the Internet today, it’s no longer possible to keep the lists updated.

Today, protection from inappropriate content is done mostly with a “filtering” approach. Rather than simply blocking certain sites from a list, “intelligent filters” look for combinations of words, phrases, patterns and even images, and deny access to sites on a real time, case-by-case basis as a child browses.

Filtering software isn’t perfect - some bad things will be missed and some legitimate sites will be erroneously blocked - but it’s a lot better than having nothing in place. With that in mind, my first recommendation is that you do as we did and purchase a commercial filtering software product. There are many available, and most are easy to install, simple to use, and relatively inexpensive (around $40 each). A few examples are CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, NetNanny and Weemote.Net.


Parental Supervision is the Key

When it comes to protecting your kids, keep in mind that filtering software is a lot like skateboard safety equipment: necessary but not sufficient! That’s where the parental supervision comes in.

In terms of the second danger - keeping your kids away from potentially harmful people – you need to oversee the Internet as you would a trip to the mall or any other public place. In other words, get involved in managing where your kids are going and what they’re doing.

In our house, we’ve taught our kids a few, simple rules: No sharing of personal information; no arranging of face-to-face meetings with people you meet on the web; and no “aimless surfing” (i.e. no wandering around the Internet without a specific objective in mind, such as research for a school project).

We also take it one step further by keeping the kids’ computer right smack in the middle of our downstairs family room, so that everything that happens is out in the open.

If you’re thinking of establishing some family rules of your own, take a look at this example put together by the folks at SafeKids.com.


More Resources

...your head may already be spinning from all the options to consider! It’s a big topic, and believe me our family certainly didn’t figure it all out in one sitting.

With that in mind, I’d like to direct you to three exceptional resources for learning about child safety on the web: the Internet Safety Resource page at TechCorps, the Parents' Guide at Yahooligans and GetNetWise, a public service site funded by an assortment of public and Internet industry corporations. All are worth spending time on and all will help clarify the issues and tradeoffs involved.