WaPo reported America's parents are relying more than ever on software filters to block what their children can see on the Internet, according to a study published Thursday afternoon.
Fifty-four percent of families that have at least one teenager living at home and have Internet access reported that they use filters, up from just over 41 percent in December 2000, according to the report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That translates to 12 million families now, compared to 7 million in 2000.
The report, available here as a PDF, says: Filters use a number of ways to determine the material it will or will not show. Due to the variety of implementation and distribution methods and the large number of filtering products currently available on the market, it is not possible to determine the incidence level of any particular filtering product or product type.- Black lists: The black list is a method of filtering that creates a list of Web site URLs that are specifically blocked. If a user types in or tries to access a specific URL, the filter will not return the page.
- Keyword lists or image searches: This type of filter actually scans Web sites or Web addresses for objectionable content, generally text and sometimes images. The software searches the site for words on a list of objectionable words (generally having to do with sex, sexual functions, violence, and other potentially objectionable content) that the filtering company maintains. If it finds a match, the browser refuses to render a site, or pops-up a warning. More sophisticated keyword filters look for words and phrases in certain contexts, allowing the filter to return more accurate results (e.g., allowing the word “breast” when preceded by “chicken” or followed by “cancer”). Some text filters are used in conjunction with image filters, which are tools that automatically search through the Web and Web sites looking for arrangements of pixels thought to indicate skin or nudity. While the image filtering technology has been slowly improving from the days when images of sunsets and pies were regularly blocked,6 it is still difficult for image filters to distinguish images of sexual acts or other inappropriate material. Keyword or image filtering technology is often used in conjunction with human assessments of a site to help a software company create and maintain a black list. The keyword or image filter automatically checks sites around the internet and then flags sites that may or may not contain objectionable content for humans to view and then decided whether to include in a black list or not.
- Internet Content Rating Systems: Some filters work in conjunction with Web site rating systems. One example is the Internet Content Ratings Association (ICRA),7 a UK-based international nonprofit dedicated to creating a functional, monitored, self-rating system for online content. They have created the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), which works by using a form that Web content managers can voluntarily fill out that then embeds a small snippet of HTML (and soon XML) within the code of the Web site that tells browsers what kind of content can be found on the site. ICRA monitors compliance by spidering sites – mechanically checking their content – at intervals to verify that the site is actually displaying content that is consistent with its PICS code designation. ICRAplus is a browser that ICRA has developed that works alone, but is most effective when used along with other filtering software to help increase the accuracy of filtering. Because there are millions of unrated sites (the rating system is voluntary), ICRAplus is not effective without other filtering support. More recently, the ICRA has begun implementing Digimarc, another voluntary program that teaches content creators how to permanently embed PICS data flags into potentially objectionable images, so that once images are loaded on to the web, browsers using PICS/Digimarc can recognize and avoid adult images regardless of how widely they proliferate.
- White list: White lists are closed systems where the filtering software establishes which sites may be visited and blocks access to all others. This method is the most restrictive method of filtering, and becomes harder to implement as children get older and need to access an ever-broader array of Web sites for educational purposes.
These filtering programs may be improved, but they are not new. In 1998 I wrote this article for the I/O Port
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