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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!
Next-generation filtering & monitoring (Aug. 10, '01 issue)
As many parents know, there's no single "right way" to protect online kids. There are probably as many good solutions as there are kids, and they're most likely combinations of software tools, family rules, and parental monitoring. We try to keep you up on the latest online-safety technologies so you can fold them into ongoing family discussion and policymaking on Internet use (there is no replacement for parental involvement!).
Here we highlight the most interesting features (from a parent's perspective) of some next-generation tools and services.
- Innovative filtering service: Updates never needed
Those of you who aren't subscribers of America Online can now get AOL's cutting-edge filtering another way - by subscribing to Cerberian's filtering service. It works with any Internet service provider. It's not a filtered ISP itself, such as Integrity Online or FamilyClick, but it is more service than product. It includes downloadable software (paid for by a $49.99/year subscription fee) that communicates across the Net with the continuously updated filtering server at Cerberian (the filtering part is on the server rather than on your home PC).
That server uses RuleSpace's just-patented filtering technology, which is what AOL now uses (see "Web News Briefs" (#3) in our May 11 issue). Put very simply, it's context-recognition filtering as opposed to the keyword filtering tech found in many consumer filtering products now on the market, and it filters dynamic Web pages as they're downloaded. Dynamic pages are like those a search engine builds "on the fly," right on your screen after you type in a word and hit "Enter." RuleSpace says 30% of the Web's pages are dynamically generated, and "traditional" filtering that uses databases doesn't work on these. Cerberian says pornography sites are particularly adept at using dynamic technology.
If you're interested in a bit of detail on how the tech works, RuleSpace's Chris Robison used the phrase "proximity mapping" - word-pattern recognition based on words' locations relative to each other - in describing to us how the technology recognizes words in context. It "learns" how to recognize these patterns by being fed "very large samples of representative content - for example, porn," Chris said. After being given a lot of these samples the technology starts to "boil them down" to a "category model" that has unique features and patterns the technology can instantly identify. The tech also uses a sample of "what we call 'anti-content' - things that are absolutely not porn, for example, 'chicken breasts'," he added. It then "analyzes" and rates content based on this information that it has "learned."
The benefit of all this to parents is not perfect filtering (perfect filtering doesn't exist), but more flexible "filtering-as-you-go" and a continuously updated database of rated Web pages - no more downloads of updates, no additional fees. This is filtering that keeps up with the Web's phenomenal growth.
However, it is only Web filtering; it doesn't provide safeguards for chat, instant-messaging, or email (see No. 2 for help with those). As for other features, though an afterthought in the design of this service, there is a monitoring piece to it: the family's Net-use data that the Cerberian server collects. Cerberian's Scott Nelson explains: "A customer can go to Cerberian.com, type in her user name and password and see what's been happening [with a child's online activities] that day. You can run reports on the past day, three days, 30 days, 60 days - however you want to configure it - and it includes specific URLs."
Here's the Cerberian/RuleSpace press release on this new service.
- Monitoring (and filtering) that honors a child's privacy
There are a lot of monitoring products out there, but what sets Security Soft's products apart is the way they allow parents to honor a child's privacy while protecting her online. The home products we're talking about are Cyber Sentinel for filtering, mentioned in "Family Tech" last week, and Predator Guard for monitoring. (See below for more on the school front.)
In a past issue (see "New online-safety tool for IM," 3/23/01), we mentioned how this company's products work for instant-messaging and chat, as well as Web use - very helpful for multitasking young technophiles - but what we're highlighting here is how it tackles a concern parents have recently mentioned. A mom and dad who are trying to figure out the best online-safety mix for their household told us they don't open their children's regular mail, so they'd like to respect their kids' privacy when they're online too.
Cyber Sentinel and Predator Guard are unique in that they alert parents only to online-safety "violations," such as sending out personal information, downloading sexually explicit content, or chatting or IM-ing with a stranger who's using phrases typical of those sexual predators use. The software neither logs everything a child does online nor takes random screen shots of whatever s/he's doing online (see below for that type of monitoring product).
For schools: If administrators are concerned about filtering's flaws but have an acceptable-Net-use policy that students need to uphold for their own protection, monitoring really is a viable option now with Security Soft's "Policy Central." With it installed on the school network, the first thing students see when they go online is the school's own Net-use policy. Before they can go further on the PC, they have to agree to comply with it. The school's system administrator has both an acceptance log and a violation log. S/he can't see anything a student does online except activities that violate the school policy - because the software only logs violations. It's like an airtight "honor system" with no invasion of student or teacher privacy.
[As for whether "Policy Central" is all a school needs for compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the jury's still out. Few people have studied the new law more than public-policy counsel and subscriber Liza Kessler, and even she says, "It really depends on the local community's understanding of the term 'filter'.... The CIPA statute reads 'filter OR block." Liza, who's been traveling around the US this summer conducting CIPA-compliance workshops for schools, says some technologists have argued that "packet-sniffing-technology monitoring products 'filter,' in that all material passing through their systems gets classified [or filtered] by their technology, although nothing gets blocked." However, she said one monitoring-tech company, Pennsylvania-based Pearl Software (makers of CyberSnoop), lobbied hard, to no avail, to get one of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), to change his bill to allow monitoring. "I've been telling people in the workshops that this is something they should consult with local school attorneys about," Liza adds, "if that's the solution they want to implement in their school districts."]
What we like about Security Soft's monitoring approach is that, in both school and home environments, 1) school and family acceptable-use policies govern online activity more than some software company's values or standards, 2) adults can show kids their privacy's being respected, and 3) useful Internet material is not blocked by over-zealous filtering products.
- Monitoring & family privacy protection
What stands out about BeAware monitoring software by Ascentive is its simplicity - of both concept and use. "Filtering is the 80% solution," said Adam Schran, Ascentive's CEO, explaining why he feels monitoring is much more effective.
If a parent's main interest is in providing a deterrent - being up front and letting kids know their online activities can be "spot-checked" anytime (even when parents are at work) - BeAware, a simple "screen capture" program, is a lean, mean little monitoring machine. Parents set the times when it takes "snapshots" of what's on the computer screen, whether it's an email message, image, Web page, or chatroom. They can look at those snapshots, or "screen grabs," from another computer, at home or work. But just having a monitoring product on a child's computer (and letting him/her know it's there!) is probably the product's best feature, blended with random, in person peering over the kid's shoulder when everybody's at home. Of course BeAware can also be used secretly, but we truly don't recommend this approach, which does nothing to foster trust and good family communications. Adam told us that's his company's philosophy as well.
There are other screen-capture programs like BeAware (such as Spector, Big Brother, and Spy Agent, which have some additional features), but this one works well with Ascentive's ActivePrivacy, which might meet another common family-online-safety goal. ActivePrivacy stops companies' and Web sites' "cookies" from gathering family members' personal information and tracking their Web surfing habits.
Ascentive itself is unique in that it's owned and operated (profitably!) by a 25-year-old CEO and a 14-year-old chief technology adviser (Adam's brother). "We started the company together," Adam told us. "Andrew is my brother. He couldn't get DSL [because of the house's location relative to the ISP] and needed to speed up his Internet connection." So, when then-university student Adam was home on vacation, they started working on a software solution. "Andrew did the programming in Visual Basic and we launched Web Rocket on his 12 birthday." He was the main code writer for Ascentive's first two products, but "after sales really started to go up and Andrew was in 8th grade pretty much full time, we had to hire some older software engineers to create the next products."
Editor's Note: These are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to bring to your attention milestones in online-safety tech development. Your experiences with these or any other such tools are valuable and most welcome (please email us)! For a software engineer's picks of products he's tested, see the very helpful Software4Parents.com.
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