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Parental Control Time Limits Can Help Media Overload

Posted on January 31, 2010 by filteringfacts

Here’s an article from the San Diego Union Tribune, that suggests among other things parents look to parental controls:

By now you’ve probably heard all about the recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that kids between 8 and 18 years old spend as much as seven hours and 38 minutes a day — yes, a day — using some form of electronic media, whether it be watching television or using other devices like computers or cell phones. Because so many kids multitask and use more than one medium at a time, the Kaiser study found that today’s children are actually able to cram 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content in each day — yes, each day. The bad news is that all this media consumption might have some negative effects. The study found that nearly half of all heavy media users reported subpar grades of mostly C’s or lower. Only 23 percent of light media users said their grades were in the mostly-C’s-or-lower range.

Most Internet parental control products offer a time-management feature, as do the operating systems of Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Many mobile phones, including those offered by ATT, T-Mobile, and Verizon offer this feature, but X-Box 360 is the only gaming console that does. Not all of these controls are created equal, though as some can be fooled by simply resetting the system clock. Others time management controls are not very flexible and only allow you block whole hours, not smaller increments.

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UK Mirror Reports on Pornography in Flickr

Posted on November 29, 2009 by filteringfacts

Earlier this month, the UK publication Daily Mirror reported on the growing issue of the large amount of easily-accessible pornography found in Yahoo’s popular photo sharing site Flickr:

Flickr is renowned as one of the best photo sharing sites on the web. But there’s a less wholesome side to what can be found on its service too, seemingly in direct breach of its parent company Yahoo!’s terms of service. We’ve been alerted to a number of public Flickr galleries containing adult material, which can easily be accessed by Flickr’s search tool, either by searching for specific content or by innocently looking for images by device. A reader tipped us off after he searched innocent-sounding body parts to create a home-made birthday card, and was surprised when innocuous searches, such as “feet” and “mouth”, brought back full frontal nudity and graphic close ups of genitalia, even with Flickr’s SafeSearch feature enabled. Yahoo!’s terms state that it “has no obligation to monitor Content”. And while we’re not coming over all prudish, or were surprised at adult content being shared, we were surprised at just how easy it was to find, especially with SafeSearch on our side.vThe photos we stumbled across were certainly vulgar and, we considered, obscene, which should put them in Flickr’s bad books. Some even appear to have been taken without the subject’s knowledge. That raises questions of whether they are also invasive of another’s privacy. Only two of the groups groups we saw were hidden behind an age check.

A follow-up story by the Mirror describes some of the filtering options, none of which are very good. There are hundreds of photo and video sharing sites available on the Internet, but the most popular sites, such as YouTube and Flickr draw large numbers of children, especially teens. While these sites all offer a great deal of fun and useful content appropriate for children, many of them also openly host inappropriate content, including pornography. Unfortunately, parental control options for video and photo sharing sites are poor. Few of these sites offer any meaningful controls over access to content, and stand-alone Internet parental control products such as Cyber Patrol or Net Nanny typically only offer the same “block everything on these sites are allowing everything” choices as they do for social networks. If you are concerned about children accessing these sites, you should purchase either a filtering or monitoring parental control product, depending on if you want to manage these sites by filtering or by monitoring.

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New Survey: 62% of Parents Monitoring Internet; 48% Filtering

Posted on November 23, 2009 by filteringfacts

A new survey by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and the University of Michigan Child Health Evaluation and Research finds that about half of US parents use Internet parental control software. A June, 2009 survey found 55% use them, and 2005 Pew survey recorded 55%. What’s new is the rise in the use of monitoring software, which I think is largely a response to social networking use. Because filters are “blunt instrument” for social networking – they either block everything from a social network or allow everything, parents seem to be turning to monitors instead:

Parents were asked if they take specific actions to protect or monitor their children’s use of the Internet. Overall, parents report the following actions:

• 65% disable pop-ups
• 62% monitor social networking sites
• 61% check history of websites
• 49% block websites they don’t want kids to use
• 32% use child-safe software

68% of parents report taking 1 to 4 of the above actions, while 19% take all 5 the of the actions listed. However, 13% of parents whose children access the Internet report not taking any of these actions to protect or monitor that use.

Also interesting is what parents expressed the most concern about, “Predators, Privacy, and Porn:”

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Google Announces Password Lock for SafeSearch

Posted on November 12, 2009 by filteringfacts

Larry Magid at CNET reports:

Google has long allowed parents a SafeSearch filtering setting that keeps kids from using the search engine to find inappropriate sites like those with explicit sexual images or text. The problem was that kids could easily change those settings. Starting Wednesday, however, the company is allowing parents to lock those settings to make it harder (though not impossible) for kids to bypass the settings. To change the settings, the parent will have to log into his or her Google account and enter a password.

This is great news for parents looking to make search engines, the primary means for accessing web content, safer for kids. This is an improvement on Yahoo’s safe search password lock, which only requires a child to click “log out” to circumvent the settings. When the user logs out of Google, the Google Safe Search cookie keeps the settings intact. But as the CNET article points out though, this solution isn’t perfect:

If you set them only for Internet Explorer, for example, they won’t restrict access from Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers. Also, according to a Google representative, the child can get around the settings by using the private browsing feature that is now built into the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Not only does using the IE InPrivate setting defeat the SafeSearch lock in Google, but the safe search settings of both Yahoo and Google are defeated by simply clicking Tools/Delete Browsing History/Cookies in IE and deleting all cookies. Again, safe search password locking is a great feature for younger users, but won’t stop a tech-savvy teen. The best overall solution is for filtering vendors to build a safe search lock into their products that covers all major search engines.

Filed under: Filtering, Internet Safety | 3 Comments »

Online Safety Blogosphere Round Up for Nov 9, 2009

Posted on November 9, 2009 by filteringfacts

Marian Merritt has a “Recap of This Year’s Family Online Safety Institute Annual Conference”
Not thinking of kids as victims. This is new thinking indeed for the Internet safety world. We know that for children who are victimized by online predators, often these are the same kids displaying risk factors for predation in the real world. Larry Magid of ConnectSafely has written a compelling story covering the FOSI conference and discussing this “watershed” moment.

Mary Heston on Wired Moms take us “Behind the Scenes at the Wired Moms Summit at Microsoft”
This last Friday Wired Moms went offline for the first time. We held our inaugural Wired Moms Summit at Microsoft. There were articles in the paper, an interview or two on TV and we have the video tape for everyone to watch once we get that back from the AV guys.

iKeepSafe gives “Five Suggestions on how to be Confident and Competent with Online Photo Sharing”
When it comes to building an online reputation for ourselves or our children, we need to “learn how to swim,” or, in other words, we need to learn to be confident and competent online. We have the following five suggestions for confident and competent photo sharing

Anne Collier writes on NetFamilyNews about “Media sharing’s upside, downside & advice on what to do about it”
Why do people share innermost thoughts, unretouched photos, and rants and what they ate for lunch in texts, photos, and blogs? And why is this not just a narcissistic passing fad like streaking or something, a baby boomer, someone who grew up with mass media, might ask?

Sameer Hinduja at Cyberbullying Research describes “Cyber-Mentors – an online anti-bullying support system of youth for youth”
I really liked this article on “Cyber-Mentors”, a relatively new program from BeatBullying (based in the UK) that is gaining traction. Justin and I believe strongly in the power of older students and youth to provide guidance and advice to younger students as it relates to peer conflict (especially the online variant).

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Hula’s R-rated Movies Lack Parental Controls

Posted on October 25, 2009 by filteringfacts

Hulu is a great video site that offers free streaming TV shows and even some feature-length films. While the broadcast TV content is what you’d expect from broadcast TV, Hulu features a number of graphic R-rated movies such as the Killing Zoe, Strictly Sexual, There’s Something About Mary and the ultra-gory Dawn of the Dead.

Here’s what Hulu’s support pages say about parental controls:

Parental Controls
Users are required to be logged into an account and over the age of 18 in order to view mature content (films rated R, TV-MA shows) on Hulu. Unfortunately, we do not have a setting that allows for more customized parental controls at this time. The best suggestion we can offer is to log out of your Hulu account while watching with younger children; this will block mature content.

If a user doesn’t have a Hulu account, they are blocked from viewing R-rated content, and receive a screen like this:

This is OK for younger children, but little more than a small hinderence for older kids. All they need to do is sign up for an account. Then when they plan an R-rated movie that get a warning screen for a few seconds, an that’s it:

Could Hulu do more? Yes, they could have password-protected settings like Yahoo does, and that’s a better solution. But this would be fairly easy to defeat by simply logging out. In order to make sites like Hulu and YouTube really safer, the website would need to download a client program to each user that locks in settings – and that’s really not the business of a video website. I think the better answer is for filtering companies to build controls into their products to manage the most popular video and photo sharing sites.

**UPDATE***

Adam Thierer of the Progress & Freedom Foundation comments”

David.. I’ve been thinking about this very issue a lot lately and come to the same conclusion that the blocking agent has to be operational at the OS level or through add-on filters. But the sticking point here is the trigger. We’d have to make sure the metadata was somehow standardized across major video hosting sites such that it could trigger the filtering tool or the OS-level blocking. Of course, major studios already embed that metadata in DVDs, so my assumption is that it could be (perhaps already is?) uploaded along with the videos to the major distribution sites. Any thoughts on how the devilish details might be worked out here? I think we’d need a multi-stakeholder effort to make this work.

That’s an even better approach. Just like Windows and most gaming consoles do with games using ESRB ratings. It’s also been pointed out that some of the streaming movies being offered by Netflix, etc. could use better parental controls. This something the industry should tackle at the OS level by taking the same approach the gaming industry has. As TV moves to the Interent, there’s no reason why ratings can’t follow.

Filed under: Internet Safety | 2 Comments »

Online Safety Blogosphere Round Up September 21, 2009

Posted on September 21, 2009 by filteringfacts

Parry Aftab asks us to “Join us at the top Cyberbullying Coalition event – October 13, 2009 in DC”
Cybersafety organizations, Internet industry and entertainment leaders, members of the media and news agencies, child protection and anti-violence advocacy groups, community service organizations, law enforcement agencies, policymakers, authors, researchers and educational institutions, coalitions and working groups are each tackling cyberbullying and the risks associated with kids and teens hurting each other using digital devices and technologies.

MobiCIP Online Safety tells us “10 Things to Consider Before Giving an iPod Touch or iPhone to Your Child”
Most parents that we talk to did not even think about it until they saw the device themselves. They spend a few minutes on it and discover that they love to play with it. The second thought that hits them is, hey, this is a mini-computer. We couldn’t agree more. Apple invented a netbook before netbooks became a category of computing devices – tiny computers that are always on and instantly connect to the Internet, giving access to the essentials of the Internet age – email, browsing, social networks, Skype, blogs, news.

Joy Howell at the Safe Internet Alliance reminds us that, “Education still first step in online safety awareness”
Online safety for kids is so important, because what they put online now could undermine their privacy, safety and security now and later, and follow them throughout their lives. We need to educate kids now so they don’t compromise their security unwittingly.

Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews tells us about, “Online-safety ed, Swedish-style”

The Swedish Media Council recently unveiled three 30-second animated videos designed to be distributed “virally” by the human peers of their star, “Eddy.” He’s “an impulsive teenage boy who tries out typical online behavior in the physical world,” and he’s meant to get youth thinking about why people act differently online. It’s interesting to see what’s rising to the top as the most salient concerns in many countries.

Pandora tells us how, “Two Local Schools Combat Cyberbullying”
The Rondout District 72 in Florida has started a Digital Citizenship Project, which just sounds awesome! In Colquitt County Georgia, the school system has boosted its emphasis on bullying, along with a revamping of its Internet use policy to include a new section on cyber-bullying.

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Are There Really 4 Million Child Porn Sites?

Posted on September 20, 2009 by filteringfacts

Last week, a report by the United Nations released a jaw-dropping statistic, reported by the AP and elsewhere:

The number of Web sites containing child pornography is increasing and more images show serious abuses, a U.N. expert said Wednesday. More than 4 million Web sites worldwide show images of children being sexually exploited, said the U.N. investigator on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, Najat M’jid Maalla. “There is an increase in the number of sites recorded,” she told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, citing research by the U.K.-industry group Internet Watch Foundation.

Four million seems a staggering number. The Internet Watch Foundation maintains a blacklist of child porn sites, and issued research in January, 2009 that stated the number was “fewer than 3,000.” The IWF website notes that, “The list typically contains less than 1000 live child sexual abuse URLs at any one time.” A blacklist maintained by Danish ISPs in February 2008, reported 3,863 blocked sites. And an Australian government blacklist published by the website WikiList listed 2,395 pages.

So where would these researchers get a figure like 4,000,000? I see two possibilities, either credible:

1) The four million number refers to child pornography images, not websites. In an interview with Reuters, “Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said its database now contains more than half a million images of children being sexually exploited.” Not four million, but at least in the same ballpark. A statistic of 4 million child pornography images in existence worldwide seems very credible.

2) The four million number refers to all pornography sites, not just child pornography sites. Research from 2004 and 2005 reported the total number of Internet pornography sites at 1.2 to 1.5 million, so a 4 million number is credible here as well. (Side note: counting the number of Internet pornography sites is difficult because the Internet porn industry operates by creating large numbers of free “feeder” sites that display free content in order to “feed” users to a few thousands pay sites).

In any event, we need some explanation from the U.N. here on this number that seems wildly at odds with other research.

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Internet Filtering Controversies Raging Worldwide

Posted on September 17, 2009 by filteringfacts

Internet filtering is drawing a lot of controversy and attention right now in the international press as well as the blogosphere.

In the United States, Suren Ramasubbu writes on the Huffington Post that “Internet Filtering Software Makers Held to Higher Standard on Sharing User Data.” Ramasubbu expands on the EchoMetrix story to take on the issue of data gathering by filtering companies more generally, including Symantec’s publication of anonymous web surfing data last month. The issue of web filtering data is complicated, because “telemetry” data from users on blocked website is an extremely powerful tool for improving filters, but as Ramasubbu points out, extra care is required to ensure privacy.
In the United Kingdom, Zack Whittaker on ZDNET asks, “Could Internet filtering cause more harm than good?:”
Because of Pandora’s Box theory – once something happens, it can never be undone and is no doubt deemed to repeat itself in the future. Where does it stop? Should the Internet be entirely monitored and blocked to ensure the safety of its users? When is Internet filtering an abuse of governmental power, and how should it be regulated?
In Thailand, the Wall Street Journal writes about, “Web Censoring Widens Across Southeast Asia:”
Attempts to censor the Internet are spreading to Southeast Asia as governments turn to coercion and intimidation to rein in online criticism. Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods — also seen in China — to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online.
In Canada, legislation has been proposed that would create a CIPA-type law for Canada requiring filters in schools and libraries.

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Sentry’s EchoMetrix Recalls N2H2 Class Clicks Program From 2001

Posted on September 7, 2009 by filteringfacts

On Friday, the AP broke the story of parental control vendor Sentry using data gathered from children to create marketing data:

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids’ online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered. Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids… The software brands in question are developed by EchoMetrix Inc., a company based in Syosset, N.Y. In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. EchoMetrix CEO Jeff Greene said the company complies with U.S. privacy laws and does not collect any identifiable information.

Déjà vu. In 2001 I worked for a now-defunct parental control company called N2H2. N2H2 was the top selling filtering vendor to public schools at the time, and decided to take all the data they were gathering on which sites children were visiting, and sell it as marketing data in a program called “Class Clicks.” I wasn’t involved in the planning and execution of Class Clicks, but the thinking was that since this was “anonymous, aggregate data” there were no privacy concerns. The company also felt that since notification about the monitoring and reuse of data was in the product End User License Agreement (EULA), this would also help cover the company. The reality was that these defenses were of almost no use during the PR firestorm that followed, and quickly forced the program’s cancellation, as this 2001 AP story recounts:

(AP) — A major Internet filtering company will stop collecting and selling the Web habits of millions of schoolchildren who use its product after privacy groups howled and the Defense Department had second thoughts. N2H2, which makes the “Bess” Internet filtering software, said Thursday it has stopped selling its “Class Clicks” lists that report the Web sites students visit on the Internet and how much time they spend at each one. After N2H2 announced its deal with marketing research firm Roper Starch last September, privacy groups called the filtering company a “corporate predator” and were incensed over reports the information would be sold to the Defense Department for recruiting.

I took over PR at N2H2 shortly after the discontinuation of Class Clicks, and I spent a lot of time cleaning up after it. It was a PR disaster that haunted the company until its acquisition by Secure Computing in 2003. Class Clicks was included in our competitor’s sales collateral as a reason not to buy N2H2, and was always brought up by our competitors in selling situations.

What’s the takeaway here? Just because what a company is doing with user data is legal, described in the EULA, and anonymous does NOT necessarily mean it’s going to be OK with customers, and won’t protect the company from bad press.

–David Burt

Filed under: Filtering Companies, Internet Safety, Policy | 1 Comment »