May 2008 — Features

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What Are We Protecting Them From?

by Matt Villano

Choosing a Filter

BACK IN THE DAYS before the federal Children's Internet Protection Act came into being in 2000, choosing a K-12 web filter didn't demand the kind of careful consideration that is needed today. Between a vendor named Secure Computing, which owned nearly 40 percent of the market share, and Websense, most schools could find a filtering product that suited them.

Today, however, as demand for K-12 internet filtering has increased and the price for the technology has dropped, the market has been flooded with smaller, more agile vendors that have developed solutions specifically for the primary education market.

Some of the most popular vendors include Check Point Software Technologies, 8e6 Technologies, and DeepNines Technologies, which all sell web filtering solutions. Most products cost less than $15,000.

For districts thoroughly pressed for cash, another reliable solution is the open source content filter DansGuardian. While commercial filters grade content against a banned list of sites, DansGuardian engages techniques such as phrase matching, PICS filtering, and URL filtering.

The newest entrant to the filtering space is SafeSquid, headquartered in India. The company offers a software-based filter that addresses content review with the same strategy as a standard proxy server. School districts sign up, and all of their web traffic is routed through the SafeSquid server before moving on to the internet.

Regulating Social Networks

Regardless of how flawed educational technology experts think CIPA is, for years the act represented the extent of federal regulations concerning child safety online, applying to both K-12 schools and public libraries. Then, about four or five years ago, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace took off, and the presence of the internet in children's lives grew, forcing a reconsideration of CIPA and other regulatory measures.

Since their arrival, social networking sites have become an almost compulsive component of students' daily routine. A 2007 study from the National School Boards Association reported that social networking is the most frequent reason kids use the internet. In fact, nearly all-96 percent-of the 1,277 responding students with online access say they've used social networking technologies of some kind. Statistics from the NSBA and other organizations that track data on social networking indicate that nearly 75 percent of school-age children have MySpace pages. And many students access these websites multiple times a day- sometimes even over their iPhones from the school cafeteria, operating over WiFi or the local cellular network.