Protecting Kids

There are a lot of good thing about the internet for young and old alike. However some of the things are not those we want children to see or be involved with. Doubtless your newspapers or news programs carry stories about children and teenages being lead astray or accessing "adult" content on the internet when parents are either out of the room or otherwise not involved in their internet use.

The following appeared in a Symantec newsletter in December 2004:

Filtering software: an essential tool to protect children on the Net
One out of three children is approached sexually in online "chatrooms" – this is the worrying finding of a study published in early November by the French association, Innocence Danger. Conducted in several European countries, the study serves as a reminder of the risks posed by the Internet and underlines the need to use filtering software to protect children. Designed to prevent children from accessing adult content, software of this kind also blocks the sending of confidential information online, such as an address or telephone number. The organisation also advises supervising children during their first surfing experiences on the web and to inform them of the risks present in forums and "chatrooms".

Fortunately there are some things you can do to protect the younger people under your care other than standing over them all the time, a strategy which is bound to fail at some point. Unfortunately I don't know a way to do this for free, but the financial costs are not very high, especially when compared to the alternatives.

We're going to look at two main areas, that of restricting the sites which can be viewed by browsing and adding some protection into the popular instant messaging (or chat) programs. We're currently testing what we think is the best policy and we'll update this page and the newsletter when we're happy with the results.

In the meantime we think that Content Protect is looking the likely winner and so we recommend you take a look at it. Click on the name or the ad below to review the product for yourself.