In closing, here are a few links I've found helpful in my research:
God bless,
Curtis S
In the previous blog I outlined a
number of top selling Content Filtering products and some of the things
I felt were flaws that diminished their effectiveness. In this blog
I'll explain what tool we did eventually select.
First, here's a
quick summary of some of the goals my wife and I established when
trying to balance my children's freedoms, ease of use, and practical
yet safe Internet usage. We wanted to:
After doing some research we settled on eBlaster from SpectorSoft. SpectorSoft offers several different 
programs / versions but the premise is the generally the same –
capture the user's activity either by logging every keystroke made by
the user or by taking screen captures at regular intervals. We selected
eBlaster because:
It's
really been the best solution we've found so far. The first thing we
did was to tell our son that we installed the software and how it
worked. We never hid the fact that we were capturing everything he did
on the PC. We have always been completely open and honest about it. We
then explained our expectations and outlined our Internet safety rules. We left the PC in his bedroom and began to read the logs on a daily basis.
What
have we learned so far? Well despite the fact that he knew we were able
to read in the log his activity from the previous day he still
struggled to stay out of trouble.
SoapBox == ON I don't
care how much you love your child, how much you trust them, or how
perfect you think they are, or how honest you feel they are
As I previously mentioned,
I initially tried to allow my son some freedom by having an Internet
connected PC in his room. I thought I could properly monitor and
control his access using some of the popular Internet child safety
tools that are readily available and heavily marketed.
I tried Net Nanny, CYBSERSitter, and finally settled on Norton Family Edition.
Yet as you'll see none of them worked completely. (Now granted I
haven't done a new evaluation in the past couple of years as to the
improvements made to these products but my search in prior years was
pretty exhaustive.)
Website Blocking / Content Filtering
The
first thing you're trying to prevent is having your child inadvertently
or on purpose visit websites they shouldn't (adult oriented sites,
blood and gore, etc.) These programs attempt to solve the problem a few
different ways.
Rating Systems like ICRA
are one attempt by the industry to control adult content. Web site
authors must include special tags/keywords on their website. The safety
programs then block access to any site with these tags. This places the
burden on the web site author and inherently doesn
We moved into our current home about 7
years ago, my son had just turned 9 years old. Like any good IT person
would do I had an Internet connection installed in every room (this was
prior to great wireless solutions). Soon after I built a new PC for my
son and placed it in his room. I called it "Internet with a door",
meaning he could close the door while surfing. Now I realized this was
not ideal but I have a good kid and I HAD A PLAN (or so I thought). I
would install one of the many available Internet child safety programs
on his PC. Boy was I misguided as to their effectiveness and to my
son's resourcefulness! The tools were pretty much worthless and my kid
was much more clever than I thought.
Before I get into what did and did NOT work, here some facts about Internet usage (stats are from Enough.org and ProtectKids.com, of course most statistical data lags several years so it would be safe to assume the numbers are much higher):
Internet Usage
Over the next few blog entries I’m going to depart from discussing leadership and technology discussions as it relates to business and instead focus on how they relate at home.
News magazine shows like 60 Minutes, PrimeTime, and Dateline have been popular for many, many years. Sometimes they expose corruption in large companies or government and sometimes some helpful consumer hints from John Stossel. I stopped watching them when the murder mysteries and celebrity interviews dominated their line-up. They had this powerful medium and audience yet focused on gossip.
That’s why I was so pleased to see the show “To Catch a Predator“, they were finally doing something worthwhile with their airtime. “To Catch a Predator” is a disgusting display of humanity’s worst in sin behavior yet it is one of the most important shows you’ll ever watch.
The Show’s Premise
NBC teams up with local law enforcement and a non-profit group called Perverted Justice. They setup in a home in a neighborhood that probably looks very much like the one you live in. One of them poses as a decoy in an Internet chat room, normally acting as a 13 year old male or female. It doesn’t take long for an adult, anywhere from 25 to 75 years old, to contact the decoy attempting to strike up a chat conversation. In just a few
minutes the adult predator turns the conversation to sex and lewd acts. I won’t go into it details but there are things discussed that only the devil himself could imagine.
In order to help with prosecution the decoy asks the predator to bring specific items over to the house such as a cherry limeade or a particular flavor of ice cream. When the predator arrives at the home they always bring the specific items. The items, along with the log of the chat discussion, makes it easy for the police to show their intent to solicit sex from a minor. Once the predator is in the door then Chris Hansen and the cameras come out to confront the pervert.Amazingly very few run or hide their face. They admit they’re wrong and make up endless excuses or wild promises that this is their first time to do this.
The predators range from 25 to 75 years old, always men (regardless of whether the decoy was male or female). They are blue collar, white collar, single, married, repairmen, programmers (one from Nickelodeon!) and even pastors and rabbis! Ugh. Even more amazing is that many are familiar with the show or were even caught before on prior episodes, yet the lure of their deviant behavior overrides common sense.
Why is this show important?
Well apart from the obvious (they are catching and prosecuting bad guys) it is educating the public (you) as to the very real danger that exists on the Internet. If you have a child (typically between 8 – 16 years old) with unmonitored access to the Internet then you might as well be driving them up and down the red light district with a “For Sale” sign on them. Children do not need to look for trouble on the Internet, the predators are looking for them.
If you haven’t watched “To Catch a Predator” then you need to watch at least one episode. It will scare you into action at home to put controls on your child’s Internet usage. Fortunately there are ways to keep your kids safe online while allowing them a few freedoms as well. Over the next few blog entries I’ll explain my personal experience and learnings as a father of two children (11 and 15) fighting the battle of the Internet in our home.
Curtis S
