Web Censorware

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

How do you "protect" kids from objectionable content online? That's the issue that refuses to die--especially in Congress, where yet more wrongheaded legislation that would force libraries and schools to put costly (and ineffectual) software "filters" on Internet-connected computers is afoot.

I've got three young children, and I would no sooner install a software filter on my computer than I would lock up the books in my library. It's not just that I'm rabidly pro-First Amendment; software filters simply don't work. It's a little like trying to collect raindrops in your hat: you'll catch some, but you'll miss most of them. Worse, filters tend to block stuff that they shouldn't block: breast-cancer sites, for instance, and virtually anything having to do with homosexuality. The Censorware Project, which opposes the use by public institutions of these blunt instruments, found that the filter used by the federal court systems in 22 states blocks a Jewish teen site, a Liza Minnelli fan page and a grocery story (I bet chicken breasts is the offending keyword). "Leaving your kid alone in the house with an Internet-connected computer and a censorware product on it is a poor substitute for parental supervision," says Jonathan Wallace, a lawyer who works on the project.

"Filters are not the answer," agrees Karen Schneider, a librarian in upstate New York, who nevertheless wrote a book called A Practical Guide to Internet Filters. Schneider's book reviews most commercial filters and explains how to make some of them at least serviceable. For instance, she advises that if you must buy a filter, pick one like Cyberpatrol, which allows you to disable "keyword blocking"--a way of getting around the breasts problem that afflicted the grocer. That way, your filter will block access only to a preselected list of offensive sites, rather than banning all the sites containing a suspect word. Of course, what constitutes an offensive site is anyone's guess: Net Nanny is the only filter that actually discloses its list of banned sites.

My recommendation is save your money. Use one of the free family-friendly search sites that are popping up all over the Web. Last week the popular search engine Lycos unveiled SafetyNet, an easy-to-use tool. Simply go to lycos.com click on SafetyNet, select a password and activate the filter. Then whenever you or anyone on your computer searches the Web from lycos.com content will be filtered. Be warned though; there are still plenty of bugs: a search of the word sex returned no results. (Sex education, however, was chock-full of advice that most parents would probably tolerate.) Then again, a search of the word gay yielded no entries; inexplicably, queer returned 10 pages' worth of stuff. (Note to Lycos: one of the first entries is from a gay adult looking for adult e-mail pals--not child-friendly.)

Another approach is Disney's Internet Guide, a preselected list of family-safe websites similar to Yahoo's Yahooligans. Since the pool of acceptable sites is limited, surfing here is a bit like going to the children's library. It also suffers from weird glitches. In testing, every time I typed in a potentially objectionable word, it retrieved a transcript of a (tame) interview between two of my favorite writers, Martin Amis and Will Self. That's a bug I could live with.