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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!
Latest trend: E-playgrounds (March 2, '01 issue)
The next generation of online-kids'-safety products is emerging, and it's circumventing the filtering debate altogether! Instead of blocking out the "bad stuff" on the Internet, these products and services are locking kids in to safe online environments. These safe "e-playgrounds" include databases of thousands of child-friendly, pre-approved Web sites.
Children are locked into these safe spaces in various ways. In one case, the service is a separate, private network like the old days of America Online and Compuserve. In others, it's an ever-growing database of pre-approved (by educators and the companies' employees), live Web sites to which kids are limited unless parents type in a password. The concepts and features aren't particularly new, but they're combined in new ways, and the absence of filtering technologies is notable. The downside of such services are the very restrictions they place on older kids' online experience, for example parent-picked "buddy lists" for instant-messaging (see "Family Tech" above and next week's issue, featuring parents' own comments on teens and instant-messaging).
There are other, less ambitious products/services out, too, which perform a single simple function, and we'll get to one in a minute. But first the e-playgrounds. Three that have come to our attention recently are:
- The Children's Internet
To get a handle on it quickly, you might call this service a safe browser for kids. But its creators, Oakland, Calif.-based Two Dog Net, Inc., have a much more ambitious vision for The Children's Internet. They see it as "the AOL for kids 3-14." The subscription-based service ($69.95/year) uses the "white list" model we described above, with a searchable database of "at least 1 million pages, and thousands of full sites" which grows daily, corporate communications director Cindy Wilson told us. The sites are screened for age-appropriateness (for ages 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, and 12-14) as well as for kids' safety (ruling out sex, hate, violence, etc.). With individual "accounts" created by their parents, kids are kept away from other software on the computer, including other Web browsers and the PC's control panel. The "SafeZone Technology" gives parents a password that allows them both to customize the software and to disengage it. Parents can add and delete allowable Web sites.
As for the ever-popular communications part, for kids to use email, parents must create an approved address list for sending and receiving (attachments allowed); instant messaging is coming, Cindy tells us, as is monitored chat.
Cindy says that what sets this service apart is its comprehensiveness and the total control it gives parents (with a "99% effective" guarantee, a claim filtering companies cannot/do not make - see "Family Tech" above). The Children's Internet is going after the school market as well, offering its safe Web database for individual teachers to customize for specific subjects and classes.
- Crayon Crawler
The makers of Crayon Crawler - San Diego-based Children's Technology Group, Inc. - think 3-14 is a bit of a stretch. Their "safe-browser-plus-community" service is designed for 3-10-year-olds. The basic concept is similar: a positive, parent-empowering approach that puts boundaries around the surfing area. In this case, CTG claims a white list of "8,000-10,000 sites." Here, too, parents can add to/delete from the database, but also "tell" the software each child's age, gender, hobbies, interests so the software can turn up relevant sites when the child does a search. What's different is that parent-configuring is Web-based - it can be done from work - and it now includes "chore reminders" (e.g., one of Crayon Crawler's animated characters popping up on the screen and saying, "Meghan, have you cleaned up your room yet?"). CTG says a later version will include an option allowing parents to be copied on all incoming and outgoing email. The pricing's a bit different, too: The browser's available free for the downloading, but community features (safe email, audio email for the littlest communicators, talking chat, etc.) are $4.95/month. Another difference is, Crayon Crawler is B2B as well as a consumer service. CTG is seeking commercial and nonprofit co-branding partners promoting online safety; e.g., their technology will soon be behind Paws, Inc.'s online safety solution, with Garfield as spokescat.
- eKIDS Internet
This is a very different sort of e-playground: It really works a lot like the old America Online or Prodigy, when they were closed subsets of the greater Internet. In those days AOL users could only email other AOL users, and AOL content wasn't available to anyone outside of AOL. EKIDS Internet is a closed global network only for kids, emphasis on global (one way it's different from the old AOL). With eKIDS, if moms and dads want access to the Internet, they have to log off eKIDS and dial up to their regular ISP. To keep kids off the "grownup Internet," they have to put a password up in front of the rest of the computer with a product like KidDesk.
That's not El St. John's recommendation, though. The founder and CEO of eKIDS's parent, San Francisco-based SilverTech Inc., told us this week that eKIDS Internet works with any software (blocking, browser, etc.) that parents want to put on the family computer, but SilverTech doesn't promote locking kids out of things. "We try to teach children choice," El said. And one of those choices is their own network, she added. Citing feedback she got from kids in a CNN roundtable after the Columbine High tragedy, El told us kids themselves are asking for a safe environment for chat and email, free from profanity and unknown adult observers.
EKIDS Internet has lots of content they produce themselves, primarily for 4-to-12-year-olds - activities, games, films, educational material. They also supply 140,000+ child-friendly Web pages from out on the Net, searchable with AskJeeves.com's plain-English technology. The pages are "cached" (stored on the eKIDS network), rather than live (as with the above services) and updated about weekly. Chat and email, quite remarkably, are monitored by humans full-time, 7 x 24; and in this case parents don't have to create an address list - kids can communicate with anyone else with an eKIDS address (not a bad way to get kids to sign up their friends!). This might seem a bit restrictive but, since launch last August, SilverTech has built a subscriber base "in the hundreds of thousands," says VP business development Greg Boegner, "and more than 2 million [subscriber startup] disks in distribution" - already a pretty good-sized universe for email and chat. The service is free.
- PC Time Cop
Then there's a very basic option for parents who simply want to limit time spent on the PC and/or the Internet. Nederland, Colorado-based Access Technology Group Inc. says the "self-installing," point-and-click PC Time Cop detects what browser or any other software a child is using and allows a parent to put time limits on its use. So the parent can control access to games on or off the Net (the software also won't allow installation of new game software), chat or instant-messaging, overall online or computer time, etc. Can they do this with TV sets yet?! Available right now only for Windows 98, the software will cost under $30, but a beta copy is free for the downloading right now at ATG's Web site.
For further reading:
- ZDNet recently published reviews of a free filtering product and two other computer time-out products.
- For information on other such products/services, go to our "Online-Safety Resources" index)
- Here's Internet.com on eKIDS Internet and The Children's Internet.
- GetNetWise.org has a searchable database and descriptions of more than 140 online-safety tools.
Do tell us what online-safety product or service your family is using - if any - and what you do and don't like about it.
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