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Readers' comments on any of these resources are alsways welcome! Do email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.Finding filtering & other software, Part 1
If they've decided to use filtering or monitoring software, busy parents usually want to know yesterday which one to buy. No hemming and hawing, thank you very much. Though this little nonprofit doesn't have the resources to test all the online-safety products out there, I can certainly point out some very credible sites that do - they specialize in picking the best and making your job much easier.
[For full disclosure, one of them - Software4Parents.com - is a contributor to Net Family News, Inc., but I recommend it because its business is built on parents' interests. "I engineered everything almost backwards," said S4P publisher Josh Finer about his service. "I heard what parents needed and added it, letting them guide me because I wasn't a parent; I was a 22-year-old entrepreneur!"]
The Washington-based nonprofit GetNetWise.org gets the prize for comprehensiveness, with its database of just about all online-safety tools available. But the best sites for narrowing the choices down are Software4Parents and InternetFilterReview.com. A third, FilterGuide.com, offers a credible 3rd opinion. The neat thing about the first two is that both of their publishers have written software themselves - they know a good product when they see its code.
At Software4Parents, absolutely key to finding a good product is whether it provides solid customer support. "It's not the software itself, it's the whole package. I want parents to have software they can use but also people they can count on, because there are always lots of issues in getting these products set up," Josh told me in an interview. "You'd be amazed how many software companies don't even reply to customer email. Some [online-safety] software was made in other countries, and there's simply no one there after you buy it and try to install it." This site recommends just three monitoring products, two filtering products, and one PC-time-controls product.
Jerry Ropelato, who started InternetFilterReview.com mainly because he's a dad, does a great job of picking the Top 10 filters and providing an at-a-glance comparison chart listing multiple criteria. His company reviews filters based on what he feels the average filter user is looking for. "We probably look at 30-40 things," Jerry said in an interview, including "how do users surf the Web and what are kids trying to do to get around the filters?" They also look at whether the product will do what it claims for a week or two on a normal PC any family would use. Jerry added: "We test the filters against certain notorious sites. There is a directory of porn sites that's updated daily. It's a gruesome site. We use that as one of the sites we test against the filters - you'd be surprised at how many filters don't catch that one."
Richard Seng of FilterGuide.com is a dad as well as a tech support employee at a very large cable company and ISP. He'd gotten a lot of questions about filtering online porn from customers and decided to provide answers in a site of his own, he said in an interview. His main criteria for a filter: "It needed to work - to function smoothly and not crash - and be fairly easy for the average person to get it installed and running." It also needed to work for families of various sizes - have multiple "accounts" with age-appropriate filtering for children of different maturity levels.
Of course, it's important to remember that we're talking about stand-alone filtering products, not ISP-based services like the Parental Controls at America Online and Microsoft Network. These are excellent services, some say they're the best and most flexible online-safety technology available. But there's just one drawback to ISP-based controls: When families have broadband connections using a local provider, kids can bypass the service and its controls (look into what PC-based parental controls these services offer). So, Josh of Software4Parents tells me, some parents want double protection. "They're adding Spector PRO monitoring to AOL Parental Controls. Kids play Quake or Doom and can talk to other players on the Net, so parents want to monitor that chat" [chat that's not in AOL or MSN and that's a part of almost all online multi-player games].
Next week, Part 2: Insights from these specialists on the filtering and monitoring of kids' online experiences.
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