Parenting 

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Filtering Programs: What are they and how do they work?

Perhaps the best way to secure online safety for children is to invest in a filtering program. With varying degrees of success these programs prevent unsuitable websites from being displayed.

• However, it’s important to remember that such filter programs are no substitute for real parental controls; neither are they completely successful – i.e. they’ve been known to block out sites that are perfectly appropriate. For instance, your 12-year-old has a GCSE human biology project and needs to research some material on breast cancer. Filter programs could prevent some key sites from being displayed because of the word ‘breast’.

• Further, sites specifically and safely aimed at teenagers can be blocked, because many of the sex sites include the word ‘teen’ in their title or keywords. Filter programs would successfully block your child from looking at ‘Club Eighteen’ – a pornographic site, but would also stop them from looking at ‘Teens vs. dyslexia’ (http://www.ldteens.org) which is aimed at helping children who have reading and writing difficulties. Hence, filter programs can be useful but they also pose problems.

The reason filter programs cause difficulties is that they almost always include a list of ‘hit words’. If these words appear in a page title or in the ‘keywords’ that are used by search engines to find such pages, they will not be displayed.

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