The result
was that prospective students whose parents had installed this filter
could not scope out their college using the World Wide Web. In fact,
the college is considering a name change, due in part to filtering
software, and, perhaps more important, the fact that the name has
somehow incurred a sexual connotation.
This is just one example of the thousands of
sites and pages that have been wrongly excluded by the use of Internet
filtering software.
Online filters also do not screen out all bad
information. These programs attempt to use some sort of artificial
intelligence and a blacklist of sites to keep the good in and the
bad out. However, with the ongoing growth of the Internet, there
is no way that all bad sites will be rejected. It’s easy to
set up rogue web servers now that can display any information its
owner wants. Put in a page with just one pornographic picture, and
the Internet filters are defeated. There is no way that a filter
can distinguish between a picture of a car, a beautiful Renoir painting,
and a pornographic picture depicting acts we wouldn’t even
want our parents to see.
However, filters can be a hindrance if you’re
a student trying to finish a paper on sexually transmitted diseases.
For such a paper, one might have to search using words such as “penis,”
“vagina,” “genitalia,” and the like. On
computers with activated filters, sites with valuable and reputable
information will be blocked out because of sexual innuendo.
The Internet is already thought of as being
generally seedy, but there are those of us who must use it for educational
purposes. I don’t think students should have to suffer because
some computer nerd decides to put a picture of his girlfriend in
a bikini on the same website as the Periodic Table of Elements or
a collection of works by Dr. Maya Angelou.
Apple computers take a slightly different approach.
A program called KidSafe gives a list of “good” sites
as determined by a team of educators and parents. This has the drawback
of keeping out a lot of good information because of the massive
influx of web pages and the slow evaluation process. It has the
advantage of making sure whatever your child sees is acceptable,
if you trust the review team, and the fact that the software is
pervasive throughout the system.
Quite honestly, even Apple’s approach
is ludicrous. While all they are giving you are websites with “acceptable”
content, it is up to a board of suits to decide what “acceptable”
is. What’s the difference? One screen’s the good, the
bad, and the ugly, while the other gives you things that Ward and
June Cleaver would approve of.
As there is no Internet regulation, its content
has always been debated. Filters give people piece of mind because
they think it is at least kept “in check.” This still
leaves students wondering how they will successfully complete a
paper on human anatomy when they have to be so careful of the words
they use in the search engine. |
