You wouldn’t leave your kids unsupervised in the middle of Dublin’s O’Connell Street, would you? But depending on what age they are, you may allow them go on a trip to town with some friends. You’d know what bus or train they were going to get, who they were going to be travelling with, what they planned to do and what time they should be home at.
Although each of us probably have different strategies and different attitudes regarding how we handle our children, the point is clear — in the real world we are comfortable setting the boundaries of their activities. Transfer those same judgment calls to the realm of the Internet and suddenly our parenting instincts go out the window.
The potential threats on the Internet for younger users have been well documented. Every parent’s worst nightmare is that their child will meet a stranger online and be lured into a face-to-face meeting with an adult. While this kind of incident is thankfully still very rare, they grab all the headlines and create a climate of fear and paranoia where more prosaic threats can be easily overlooked.
Because of their inherent trust, children are even more at risk than other users from the usual Internet scams and annoyances. They can come across aggressive marketing, harassing and hate e-mails, be the victims of fraud or even have their PC hijacked by hackers. Older children may also seek out pornography or other unsuitable sites out of a sense of curiosity.
‘The mainstream press has placed a lot of focus on the cases around child pornography,’ says Paul Durrant, general manager of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland. ‘The ISPAI view is that there are bad things on the Net as with any walk of life, but it is an extremely small proportion of what’s out there. Yes it does exist but it’s a minuscule part of a huge amount of wonderful content that is of huge benefit to your children.’
Clearly the most important thing for parents to do, if they haven’t done so already, is to become familiar with the Internet themselves. There are many suitable courses available around the country for parents, including the SOS — Surf On Safely course offered by Elite Computer Training, which is designed specifically for this purpose.
Mary Horton, managing director at Elite, says she set up the course because, ‘I have heard so many times from parents who won’t have it in the house because they do not understand it, or know how to protect their children as a result.’
Aimed at parents, educators, community leaders — in fact anyone that is concerned about children and their use of the Internet — the course covers a range of topics such as the difference between instant messaging programmes and chat rooms, web-based
e-mail, downloading free programs with hidden payloads, and filtering. Filtering refers to a class of software programmes that can be installed on a PC to monitor and block access to inappropriate material. These parental control packages such as Net Nanny, Cybersitter and Cyber Patrol are available to purchase online.
Although there are subtle differences in the features offered by each, they all broadly work in the same way. They employ a ‘blacklist’ — a list of known sites containing pornography, hate speech or violence that is not suitable for children — and block
access to them. Some such as Cybersitter merely monitor the traffic for later review and so are more suitable for older children who can be a given a certain amount of autonomy.
The list of sites is usually researched and is updated regularly. As with anti-virus packages, it is important to purchase an annual subscription so you have the latest list of sites. Parents can also add their own list of sites that they may not want their kids to
visit. Keywords are also used to block sites with certain types of content although this kind of filtering has proved controversial as it can also block legitimate sites. Each user of the PC can have their own filtering settings so the software can be customised
according to age or interests.
PC manufacturers have also started to include parental control software on machines before they are shipped to users. Irish manufacturer Iqon ships two different packages on its PCs. PixAlert analyses images on a PC, enabling parents to review any images
stored on the PC and block the download of pornographic images. PCEye2000 is a monitoring application that logs web sites visited, shows exactly how long the PC visited any web site, what software applications were used, e-mails sent, chat sessions, pages printed — basically any activity on the PC.
Schools are also struggling with the issue of filtering, says Richard Foley of Reflex, one of the Irish agents for the SurfControl filtering package. ‘Schools are very aware of this and they see filtering software as something that can help them, the problem is money,’ says Foley. ‘They all want to do it. It’s not an unwillingness, it’s an inability.’
In fact, Foley has seen some schools put in Linux servers so that they can avail of public domain blacklist products which don’t come with a yearly subscription charge. Although clearly this hits his revenues, he thinks it’s a better strategy that schools do this and then invest their budget in a commercial anti-virus product.
He also suggests that schools should be given access to the Government VPN. This would in effect mean they would have access to a secure section of the Internet with inappropriate sites filtered out. The security provided by a VPN would also mean children would not be at risk of receiving contact from adults.
The Futurekids training organisation has recently started offering the NetFilter products to schools. It installs a small piece of client software on each PC which then directs all requests for web pages through a master server to determine if the site should be blocked. According to Mike Travers, a director of Futurekids, the service
works out as little as €1.30 per PC per month and blocks a wide range of content, from sport to pornography, that teachers may not want kids viewing during school hours. A particularly innovative feature of NetFilter is that it can block links on a page to inappropriate content such as games, while still allowing students view the main page.
As an internet service provider, Esat BT, owners of the popular service provider Ireland On-Line, is acutely aware of the necessity to provide a family-friendly online experience. It is advising its broadband customers to avail of its special offer on the CyberPatrol filtering and monitoring package, which it is making available to IOL
subscribers for €31.20 a year, if downloaded from its online shop. ‘Anyone can buy and install CyberPatrol, it’s one of the top filtering applications available,’ admits Larry Taylor, media services manager with Esat BT. ‘What we are doing is selling it as a special offer and making it immediately accessible to all our users. If you download it over broadband you can be up and running straight away with no user intervention required and parents can start running reports on activity. It gives the billpayer control over what their family sees. Ironically the billpayer is usually the least technical person in the house but they are the people most worried about this kind of content.’
While PC level filtering is a very useful tool for families to have in their arsenal, many Irish homes would probably sign up for a service that is filtered by the ISP itself and only allows access to pre-approved sites on the Internet. This kind of service is widely available in the US but has yet to become available here. Esat BT has been receiving feedback on its parent BT’s trials of a technology code-named ‘Cleanfeed’, which filters web pages based on their address or content and is being used to block BT subscribers from accessing child pornography and other illegal material.
‘It uses a known blacklist of sites hosting illegal content,’ explains Taylor. ‘There should be no objection to having this at the ISP level but civil liberties groups have questioned the free speech implications of pre-screening content. We’re taking a cautious approach and looking at what effect it has in the UK. We’re also looking to get feedback on it from politicians here.’
The issue for service providers with filtering is that they want to avoid becoming legally responsible if illegal content still makes it through to a user. Which is why technologies such as Cleanfeed are rigorously tested before being offered to customers as a service. ‘If Cleanfeed is technically possible and found to be legally and socially acceptable, we will go ahead and do it here.’
And ISPs are clear that there is a distinction between adult-orientated content such as top-shelf pornography which is available in newsagents around the country and illegal content such as images of child pornography. The latter can be easily identified but decisions on the former are moral rather than legal ones and as such an area that the ISPs are keen to steer clear of.
If your children do come across illegal material such as child pornography online it is important that they feel comfortable informing you of this. Sightings of child pornography should also be reported to the Hotline at www.hotline.ie, a site established by the ISPAI in 1999. According to Paul Durrant, the number of reports to the Hotline has steadily climbed in recent years, but he puts this down to the increase in Internet usage and awareness of the Hotline, rather than an increase in child pornography. The Hotline co-ordinates with similar operations in other countries when it receives reports in an attempt to track down where the images have come from and stop their dissemination.
Useful links:
Crayon Crawler www.momsanddads.com
CyberPatrol www.cyberpatrol.com
Cybersitter www.cybersitter.com
Cyber Snoop www.cyber-snoop.com
Net Nanny www.netnanny.com
The dangers of camera phones
Since camera phones were launched on the Irish market at the end of 2002, their use by children has been a matter of concern. Many schools have now prohbited their use and they are banned at Irish colleges held during the summer. There have already been incidents where students in schools have been caught sharing pornographic images on their mobiles. Earlier this year a Cork teenager was sent a pornographic lesbian picture on her mobile by a total stranger. Teachers say that mobile porn is not unusual in schools.
As it currently stands, the mobile networks can do little to police whether paedophiles are using their handsets to share child pornography. Pre-paid phones in particular could prove popular for this kind of activity as owners do not have to register and so they can be potentially even more anonymous than a PC connected to the Internet. A spokesperson for Vodafone said there is little it can do about peer-to-peer swapping of pornography but that as a member of the Irish Cellular Industry Association, it is involved in a tendering process for filtering software that would remove inappropriate material from operators’ networks.
The Minister for Communications has called for a register of 3G phones as their increased bandwidth and other multimedia capabilities could make them even more attractive to paedophiles. The ICAI has since written to the minister seeking clarification of a number of issues with regards to this proposal. ‘Customers can rest assured that we are taking this matter seriously,’ said the Vodafone spokesperson. ‘We are very conscious of what can happen and are looking at all our options.’ The ICIA has also published The Knowledge — A Parents’ Guide to Mobile Phones.
It is designed to help parents gain a more complete understanding of the range of mobile phone services on offer in Ireland to which their children may gain access and can be downloaded from their website at www.icai.ie.
Tips for parents
1. Go online together
If you are familiar with the kind of things your children do online it will be much easier to talk to them about their activities.
2. Monitor your children’s activities
It’s not a good idea to have PCs in a child’s bedroom — have it in a ‘public’ place where it is much easier to keep an eye on their activities.
3. Use filtering software
Filtering software may not be failsafe but it will certainly reduce the chances of your children coming across inappropriate content.
4. Establish rules
Schools have an acceptable Internet usage policy that kids have to sign up to — why not have one at home?
5. Never give out personal information
Ensure your children never give out any personal information online. At worst it can be used by paedophiles hoping to win their confidence; at the very least it will be used by unscrupulous marketers to send you spam.
6. Know your child’s online friends
You don’t let your children play with strangers offline so why do it online?
7. Use age-appropriate chat rooms
Encourage your kids to use child-friendly chat rooms and tell you about anyone they meet online.
8. Choose passwords and user names carefully
Choosing obvious and easy to crack passwords can open you up to the risk of cyber-impersonators.
18/10/04
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