Youth, Pornography, and the Internet (2002) / Chapter Skim
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11. A Perspective on Technology-Based Tools
11. A Perspective on Technology-Based Tools
Pages 258-266
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From page 258... ...
attempt to stay aware of their children's activities and some young people, particularly adolescents, attempt to evade parental oversight. Technology-based tools for protecting children from exposure to inappropriate Internet material and experiences promise "hard" security against unknown threats and offer to compensate for parental lack of knowledge about how to understand and control the Internet usage of their children.
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From page 259... ...
But as noted in Chapters 8 and 10, a strong infrastructure of social and educational strategies that help children develop an internal sense of appropriate behavior and response is foundational for children's safety on the Internet. Technology-based tools can serve useful roles in much the same way that "training wheels" have a useful role in teaching children to ride bicycles.
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From page 260... ...
to increase the range of options available to help parents and other responsible adults fulfill their responsibilities. · Some technological developments, such as the trend away from open chat rooms to closed instant message rings, will make it more difficult for spammers and molesters to find individual victims.
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From page 261... ...
Not all tools, or even a given type of tool, are equally adept at identifying all kinds of inappropriate material. For example, for reasons described in Chapter 2, the identification of certain types of inappropriate sexually explicit material e.g., that which is found on adult Web sitesis considerably easier from a technical standpoint than the identification of other types of sexually explicit material or other types of content that may be judged inappropriate (e.g., material on bomb making, hate speech, religious cults)
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From page 262... ...
Further, the wide variety of computing environments often forces vendors into requiring a "setup" procedure to adapt the tool to the user's particular hardware/software configuration. And, because of the constantly changing nature of the Internet, the tools must constantly be updated in order to remain current and valid.
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From page 263... ...
is often all that is necessary to defeat the most effective technological tools for protection. A change of venue may be a deliberate attempt to avoid technologically imposed restrictions, as in the case of students using home computers with Internet access to bypass filtered access at schools.
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From page 264... ...
· The deployment of technological tools entails some financial cost, both initially and in ongoing costs. Thus, one potential social inequity is that those lacking in resources will be denied the benefits of various tools a "digital divide" issue.2 Advocates of using tools might argue 2For example, in 2000, 54 percent of public schools with access to the Internet reported that computers with access to the Internet were available to students outside of regular school hours, and secondary schools were more likely than elementary schools to make the Internet available to students outside of regular school hours (80 percent compared with 46 percent)
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From page 265... ...
11.3 THE QUESTIONS TO BE ASKED OF EACH TOOL Chapters 12 and 13 discuss seven major types of technology that can be used to protect or limit children's exposure to inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet. These include filtering, adoption of specialized domain names, surveillance and monitoring, age verification technologies, instant help, tools for controlling spam, and tools for protecting intellectual property.
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From page 266... ...
Protection against inappropriate material does not exist in a vacuum, and in general, an infrastructure is necessary to support the long-term use of a tool that provides maximum protection consistent with the user's other functional requirements. Costs should be understood broadly, and they include financial costs, ease of implementation, ease of use, false positives and false negatives, interference with the functions being served in the chosen environment, and lack of transparency about the option in operation.
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