Free unrestricted accessing of content on the Web is in principle the ‘Bless’ of the Internet but at the same time a major social concern. Child Pornography is one very loud example. Eventhough children are encouraged to access information via the Internet to broaden their horizons and enrich their knowlage base, every responsible parent is worried whether their child will come accross inappropriate content such as pornographic material or even worse be manipulated and become part of the content to serve sick paedophilic minds.
A number of ‘tools’ are available today usually falling under the term “parental control”. These are usually applications that enable filtering of content. Also authorities and Internet Crime police divisions use methods and tools to trace people who provide or access such content and legislation does exist to punish those that cause harm especially to minors . If one asks “Which approach is the most effective” will probably get many different answers. In our opinion the answer should be “No approach is solving the problem completely” in the same way that no parent has ‘peace of mind’ when the kids go out on their own.
The reason is because both the source as well as the receivers (The computer used by the children) are out of control. There is (correctly) not a single point of entry to upload content over the Internet and among the millions of Internet users there are millions of user profiles - various ethical levels, different perception of importance, sense of urgency, ignorance of the technology, ignorance of the range of content, levels of curiosity, various maturity levels etc… So even if a Parent is willing to protect his/her child, could fail to properly identify an effective Software, properly install it and be sure that the kid is not capable enough to deactivate or by-pass… Especially since most parents are less capable than their children over the web and for sure less capable than hackers or intentional criminals. Restricting content at the Source side is even more dangerous. Which company or government would ALL Internet users TRUST that is doing the proper filtering and not manipulating content for its own interests…If one entity has control over the ‘Bad’ content will also have control over the ‘good’ content.
In our opinion an effective treatment of this major problem should be at the hands of the Client but requires a different approach than what is applied today.
Alma5 Ventures is working on a concept to help effectively protecting Minors from inappropriate content. Corporations willing to apply or Investors, contact ventures@alma5.com for more details.