http://www.jagular.com/netsafety.shtml
| The purpose of this essay is to explain why I think that the most obvious opportunity for someone who wants to contribute to making the Internet safe for children is for that person to publish useful information for parents which tells them where to get the tools and information they will need to exert a reasonable amount of control on their children's access to email, chat rooms and the web and for that information to be provided in such a way that it does not appear to be in support of selling some particular product or promoting some particular political agenda. |
There is a lot of material on the Internet which is objectionable to many people.
Many parents feel that their children are or could be exposed to too much objectionable material on the Internet and they are very anxious to reduce this possibility. There is a strong demand for products and services and information by millions of people and many of those people would be willing to pay for the tools and information they are seeking. This creates business opportunities for people who can provide these products, services and information.
There are already many competing software products which claim to provide tools for people wishing to restrict access from their computers to objectionable material on the Internet. These products variously cover web browsing, filtering spam emails, sending anonymous emails, chatting in supervised chat rooms and other types of blocking and filtering.
It would be very difficult to develop a new software product which could compete with the available filtering and blocking software products without spending a great deal of money.
There are already many websites which provide lists of tools which parents and others can use to block and filter content on the Internet. It would be difficult for a new website to attract very much attention given that all of these other websites already exist.
The issue of providing tools for filtering and blocking on the Internet is closely associated with the political views and agendas of conservative, right-wing and religious groups in the United States. It would be difficult for someone to provide tools and information for filtering and blocking without appearing to be associated with the collection of these various groups.
For every group which speaks strongly about the need for web censorship there is some other group which speaks equally strongly for the need to resist web censorship.
Many of the services which provide information for blocking web pornography (perhaps most notably CyberSitter) do so by keeping a list of allowed websites, blocking all others. There are many groups which monitor these lists and report unreasonable censorship based on political or other motives. Some of the web censors will block "right to life" pages for instance and CyberSitter will block all pages which criticize CyberSitter itself.
The more effort which people spend to block children's access to objectionable material on the Internet, the more effort teen-aged children will spend on getting around these restrictions. Teenagers will exchange various lists and secrets for unblocking the most stringent Internet filtering programs. It is not possible to prevent someone from seeing a web page which they are determined to see.
The best one can hope for when trying to block access to objectionable material on the Internet is that inadvertent access can be blocked, that is, that someone will not likely see pornography or other objectionable material by mistake. If someone is determined to see some particular type of material on the Internet then no-one will be able to stop them.
It can be somewhat difficult to find a good source of accurate and timely information about any topic on the Internet without being bombarded with advertising or being asked to buy something. Few people give away good information without asking their readers for something in return. There are many websites which used to give away useful information and which, once becoming popular, were sold to someone who proceeded to fill the main page of that previously useful website with advertising, burying the good material somewhere else on the website. There are many examples of this, including www.mapquest.com and www.browserwatch.com.
The most obvious opportunity for someone who wants to contribute to making the Internet safe for children is for that person to publish useful information for parents which tells them where to get the tools and information they will need to exert a reasonable amount of control on their children's access to email, chat rooms and the web and for that information to be provided in such a way that it does not appear to be in support of selling some particular product or promoting some particular political agenda. For all of the time and money being spent by thousands of organizations and companies on dealing with child-proofing the Internet and all of the tens of thousands of web pages which address one or another aspect of this issue, the one thing which is still difficult to find is a good source of information which is independent of any commercial or politically motivated group.
A website which provides information for making the Internet safe for children could provide an organized list of links to various websites and software programs which cover the various aspects of this issue. The website could provide a lot of information in which the various websites and products are compared with each other.
The obvious question which arises when one suggests the establishing of the above-mentioned website is "How will this website make any money?" The answer to this is that the only way to stand out as a useful, informative, fair and independent source of information would be for the website organizers to worry first about having a high-quality website which is respected and used by tens of thousands of people and to worry about making money after this has been established. A site which has established itself in this way will be able to make money from advertising. The advertising could be kept in context so that ads would only appear where the readers might want them to appear. Ads for toys could appear on pages on which parents are told "Here is a list of people who sell toys." Ads for family cruises could appear on pages on which parents are told "Here is a list of family holiday ideas." There would be no need for banner ads for Walt Disney World or Toys R Us on the main page of the website. Once families get used to going to this website to get useful information they can be slowly introduced to using the site to get useful information about products and services which they can buy as well. This is not trickery: if you have a home page on which you provide links to "Tools for Making the Internet Safe for Kids" and "Family Holiday Ideas" and someone clicks on the latter then that person will not mind seeing advertisements for Walt Disney World because that is what they have asked for. The advertising which annoys people is the ads which are out of context with the information content or the stated purpose of the web page being viewed. One does not wish to see an ad for Holiday Inns when one is viewing a web page entitled "Email Anonymizers" but one does want to see an ad for Holiday Inns when one is viewing a web page entitled "Hotels Which Provide Suite Accommodation for Families."
Here are some web links to pages providing various tools and information related to this topic: