Filtering the Web to protect children

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 32, No. 10 (November 2, 2000). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

As in any other election season, the topic of protecting children has been a hot one over the past few months. This is a technology column, so I’ll look at the two major candidates’ positions (which are boringly similar) on protecting our children from harmful WWW content.

I chuckled once when I was browsing the Dr. Dobb’s website and saw a claim that “A firewall protects me from the harmful and licentious World Wide Web.” The web can be a tremendous source of useful information or simple entertainment, but no one can pretend that the web is an Information Utopia. The web is teeming with wild and bizarre content. For instance, consider the Body Modification E-zine at http://bme.freeq.com/. I’m amazed at all the body parts people are willing to poke with needles and slice with razors. Maybe I’m just a prude.

When people think of harmful content—especially with respect to kids—they’re usually thinking of pornography. Lots of schemes have emerged to prevent children from accessing X-rated websites. Many of these schemes act like filters. Net Nanny is a product that prevents your browser from visiting sites on their objectionable list and allows users to specify additional objectionable sites. Some Internet service providers, like Integrity Online, advertise filtering as a feature of their service. Other filters block sites on the fly based on the presence of certain words or even too much skin in images.

Both Bush and Gore support mandatory content filtering on computers in publicly funded facilities like schools and libraries. Most people could probably agree that viewing pornography is an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ resources, but the problem goes deeper. What exactly is harmful content? I know people who don’t let their kids watch The Simpsons because they’re afraid Bart will become a twisted role model. (I wonder whether they worry that their kids will become promiscuous killers after watching James Bond movies.) Some people hold the absurd opinion that the Second Amendment does not protect private possession of firearms, so does that make the content on the NRA’s site harmful?

When you introduce religion, all bets are off. What impact would reading “you’ll burn in Hell if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as the son of God” have on a Jewish kid? How about the impact on a Christian kid after reading material on an atheist site? An even more frightening question is who will control the list of bad sites? What hidden agenda will the controlling party have?

When someone says that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet,” I expect him to have a better grasp on the issue. (Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t use the Internet, so his only choice is to toe the party line.) There are millions upon millions of sites on the World Wide Web. Very conservative estimates guess that around one-quarter of all websites are pornographic. Even if no one ever brought a new porn site online, trying to filter porn sites would be like trying to sweep the beach free of sand. The other tactics, like filtering on naughty words or trying to guess which pictures have nudity, are mere heuristics. A computer scientist named Mark-Jason Dominus once noted that “heuristic” is a fancy way of saying “doesn’t work.” In addition, these filters assume that the kids can’t outsmart them.

I was a geeky kid, but when I lived at home I was the hero who could program the VCR and set the clock on the microwave and fix computer problems. People who think clever and determined kids won’t find a way to circumvent the filters are kidding themselves. Even more likely is that there will be someone down the street whose parents don’t use a filter.

What’s the answer? Adult supervision is a solution, but it’s only part of the answer. As kids get older, they stray further and further from their parents’ watchful eyes. They’ll inevitably come across harmful material. It’s called growing up.

Well, imagine if a company marketed a BB gun that came with some kind of warning like “Dangerous product! Do not use without adult supervision!”