How Kids Bypass Web Filters
Children, whether at school or home, will try to bypass web filters that are placed between them and the internet. Not all, but most have either a rebellious streak (remember yours) or a curiosity that will kill the cat.
Internet filtering has become big business for some companies, providing parents with peace of mind. But, is that peace justified? Are there ways for children to bypass internet filters without their parents knowing?
Ask a teen. They will tell you that there is more than one way to bypass most filters. Maybe they catch you typing in the password for them, maybe they use a web proxy to bypass the school filter, whatever way, some ingenious little bugger at school will figure it out and tell all his friends.
In particular web based proxies have been a problem for most internet filters. There are new ones created on a regular basis. Some free speech and children’s rights advocates believe they are doing children a favor by allowing them to bypass the protection a loving parent has provided for his or her child. It is much like purposely leaving the back door wide open while the parent deadbolts the front door and thinks all is well.
That is why you need an Internet filtering service and not just free software. First of all, the free internet filters can’t keep up with the ever changing internet. They have little or no budget for continued research and monitoring of new sites. You need a team of professionals, whose job it is to monitor what’s going on and daily make the changes needed to protect your children online.
An internet filtering service that combines filtering, monitoring, reporting and continued research and development is the only thing that is going to help. Clean Internet is one such company. In business for over 10 years, Clean Internet is company that knows where the internet has been and where it is going. Protect your kids today with a reliable filter that doesn’t have password that can be compromised and won’t let web proxies bypass the internet filter.
Clean Internet, click here to find out more.
The Department of Justice recently unveiled new parental education campaigns. One of the PSAs, entitled “Know Where They Go,” http://www.knowwheretheygo.org/en/ stresses that it is important that parents MONITOR what sites their children visit and who they are talking to. Studies by the Pew Internet research group and monitoring software vendor Spectorsoft agree – they show that low cost monitoring software products such as Clean Internet and PC Spy Pro are more effective than Web Filtering applications alone, in protecting kids on the web. They will detect if, and how, children get around filters. They will record everything they do – every web site, web searches (for example proxy). You can set keyword alerts for terms such as suicide and proxy and be notified each time they are found.
The problem with most of these blockers or filters is that they only block known inappropriate content. The rate at which new pages are added to the web makes it an impossible task for filters etc to keep up. I am constantly looking for ways to protect my children and have just discovered a site that at first glance seems to protect them. They work on the principle that the entire internet is blocked but as web sites are reviewed by trained teachers and parents in person they then become categorised by age. They have over 600,000 approved sites. In your parent account you are able to block pages, allow additional pages as you see fit etc. You also can get reports about your childs activity see what has interested them. You can even set it so that when your computer is turned on thats all that is available to them. I am trying it out with my children and they seem to be very excited about it. So it seems to solve the problem.