- The Internet/kid-safety conundrum
It truly is a balancing act, a long-term one:
protecting kids on the Net while protecting free speech on the Net. SafeKids.com's
Larry Magid gives it a fresh look in his column for the San
Jose Mercury News this week, and thereby helpfully frames the issues.
He looks at US online-child-protection laws currently under review in
the courts, at Internet industry educational programs aimed at keeping
censorship at bay, and at Internet ratings - by far the most internationally
feasible of child-protection efforts to date and, as such, the one with
the farthest to go (simply because global adoption by all Web sites is
its difficult goal). [See No. 3 just below for more on online safety in
Europe.]
Larry clarifies that Web site rating is not about
censorship or even self-regulation. "It's all about disclosure," he writes
- about publishers labeling their Web content so that browsers instantly
"know" what's there and block as configured by parents who've decided
what's appropriate for their kids. Please see the column for details,
and here's our coverage of last
week's breaking news on Internet ratings.
- Image file-sharing and kids
Here, too, the free-speech/kids'-safety balance
is being tested. In its just-issued report "Peer
to Peer Opportunities: Keeping an Open Mind on File-Sharing Networks,"
the Benton Foundation is trying to balance child-safety concerns - raised
by a US congressional report last summer - with the opportunity to identify
and develop noncommercial, public-interest applications for peer-to-peer
file-sharing on the Net.
Very basically, the Benton report suggests that
before Congress legislates or the publishing industry litigates, the upside
of file-sharing should be given a chance. Benton gives fair treatment
to Reps. Waxman and Largent's message (see our
coverage), as well as parents' concerns (see those of a Kansas mother's
experience in our 7/13 issue). For example,
parents should definitely know what file-sharing Net users know - that
many of the files available on the new file-sharing networks that include
image and video files are pornographic and that "teens and children made
up a significant portion of the user groups for these file-sharing programs."
Both Benton and the earlier congressional report cite a December 2000
Pew Internet & American Life study finding that 53% of US Internet-using
teens ages 12-17 (about 7 million), had downloaded music from the Internet,
and many of them are now using the new, multimedia file-sharing services.
- How filtering looks in Europe
The European Commission spent good money to find
out what we all already know: Web filtering is flawed. But to be fair,
the study, "NetProtect", was
a necessary means to an end: The EC's Safer Internet Action Plan's goal
of developing a European prototype multilingual filtering system for parents
and teachers.
Besides the best-known flaws - inappropriate blocking
("most frequently cited one") and under-blocking, where children gain
access to pornographic content - language is another major obstacle to
truly useful filtering worldwide. According to Newsbytes.com,
the study found that filters "cannot decipher non-English, and therefore
most European, Web sites."
NetProtect looked at 50 filtering programs, including
the "10 most popular": BizGuard, Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sitter, Cyber Snoop,
Internet Watcher 2000, Net Nanny, Norton Internet Security, Optenet, Surf
Monkey, and X-Stop. The two with the highest overall ratings "were far
from the best at blocking harmful sites." One blocked only 65%, the other
46%. Even the best site in the blocking category blocked only 79% of "harmful
sites." (Please follow the Newsbytes or Net-Protect links to find out
which product did what.)
To see what types of content inadvertently gets
blocked, there's another new study about (and list of) "Sites
Blocked by Internet Filtering Programs," by Harvard College student
Ben Edelman. His research is part of expert testimony in the case of "Multnomah
County Public Library et al., vs. United States of America, et al.," in
the American Civil Liberties Union's challenge of the Children's Internet
Protection Act (CIPA). Our thanks to the Bureau
of National Affairs Internet Law newsletter for pointing out this
resource.
- Earthlink joins filtering fray
It took Earthlink more than a year of mulling,
but this Internet service provider to 4.8 million subscribers has just
announced it will offer them the option to filter, reports Wired
News. The filtering comes in the form of SurfMonkey's children's browser
, which Earthlink has licensed. "The basic filtering
service is free to subscribers. Additionally, Earthlink offers a premium
service for $2.95 a month that gives parents greater control over their
children's Internet tracks and lets children access specialized e-mail
and chat rooms," Wired reports, adding that the browser allows kids access
to a "white list" of 15,000 SurfMonkey-approved Web sites. The images
at the top of Wired's story show, when clicked on, what a page looks like
when it has and hasn't been filtered.
