Internet Safety Part Two

(Internet Safety Part One)

Objectionable Material

There’s a lot of really bad stuff out there— pornography, bomb recipes, instructions on committing suicide, occult material, and more. Parents and teachers want to limit the access their charges—and they themselves—have to such things.¹

First you have to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t. For a discussion of the Christian’s approach to objectionable materials in general, see the BJU Press white papers "A Biblical Approach to Objectionable Elements" (and "The Christian Philosophy of Education." Then, you have to create a system that generally decreases your risk of being exposed to something spiritually unhealthy. That’s not a one-step process; the best systems are just that—systems.

Supervision

By far the simplest and least expensive solution to these problems is proper supervision. If Mama is sitting next to Junior, helping him surf, Junior is not likely to get into mischief. If the adults control the login passwords, they can lower the likelihood that unsupervised access will occur (though, of course, a child can use someone else’s login, if he knows it, to access the net from a machine you are responsible for). Some couples split the access password, with the husband knowing one half, and the wife knowing the other half. Thus neither can log in alone. This provides simple accountability under normal circumstances.

Some users have extended the concept of accountability in a creative way by using software that regularly e-mails their Internet use to an "accountability partner." For two such packages, see http://www.covenanteyes.com/ and http://www.safeeyes.com/.

You can make your job of supervising easier by making sure the computer screen is in a public place—in the school library, for example, and facing the traffic flow rather than in a corner of the room. In a home, it’s better to have the computer set up in the living room rather than in a child’s bedroom and with the monitor facing the doorway so that it can be seen by anyone passing by.

Most Internet browsers maintain a site history file or folder on their hard drive where they store a list of all of the Internet sites visited.² Teachers and parents can easily look through this material and ask about questionable accesses. And if your students are smart enough to erase the history after using the browser, that act in itself is cause for suspicion and investigation.

For more detailed tracking, you can install software that tracks every user’s keystrokes and monitors all Internet activity. For more information on such programs, see http://familyinternet.about.com/cs/toppicks/tp/monitoringsoft.htm.

Good supervision starts with good teaching, of course. Students using the Internet should be told what sort of behavior is not acceptable and what the penalties will be for infractions. Many schools today are spelling these expectations out in an official Acceptable Use Policy. Searching for "Acceptable Use Policy" at any search engine, such as Yahoo or Google, will provide you with a good many examples from which you can work.

Much of the temptation to misbehave on the Internet, which both young people and adults may find difficult to resist, draws its strength from the misperception that activity on the Internet is private. In a bookstore, for example, someone who has trouble resisting pornography may restrain himself because he is in public and his actions might be seen, with future negative consequences. Many Internet users believe that similar actions on the Net are not as public, and because they are in "the privacy of their own home," they fall to the temptation. They are simply wrong, however, not only in giving in to temptation but also in their understanding of the Internet. The Internet is a public place, and the user is naïve to believe that his actions are private. They can be monitored at the computer, of course. But they can also be monitored literally anywhere else in the world. Any site the user visits, whether pornographic or not, can track his activity and can even place a record of that activity on his computer (as a cookie) without his knowledge. Should the personnel at the target site choose to, they could make his activity public in a broader sense. In the United States, certain laws protect a consumer’s privacy, but the Internet is an international medium, and sites offshore are not bound by U.S. laws.

There are "solutions" that prevent target sites from knowing the identity of those who visit them. But they provide a false sense of security; in order to access them, the user must send his request—say, to go to a pornographic site—to his Internet service provider and from there through (usually) several other host machines between the service provider and the anonymizer. (On a Windows machine, try using the DOS command "tracert" to see just how many machines you traverse to get from your Internet service provider to another site.) On every one of these machines, there is then a record of the user’s request to access, in this case, pornography. If the administrators of those machines choose to log activity, there is a permanent record of that transaction, which might become public through any number of circumstances.

We’ve gone into this detail here simply to make the case that privacy on the Internet is a myth. The user’s actions are observable and traceable. This knowledge should serve as a powerful deterrent to those who have difficulty overcoming the temptations that the Internet places before them. And to the extent that the knowledge does that, it’s a Good Thing.

Site Blocking

Several software packages are available to help parents and teachers block student access to specific Internet areas, much as a channel blocker does on television. The software may be "client-based," or installed on the user’s computer (where it may be more easily compromised or circumvented); or it may be "serverbased," installed on a host machine, to which the user logs in as his Internet service provider (ISP).

Further, most packages use "can’t-list" technology; that is, they maintain list of sites to which users "can’t" go. The trouble with this approach, however, is that objectionable sites are created virtually every day, and an old site can always change its name every so often. Thus, many software companies also provide an updating service, free or for a reasonable fee; they usually allow registered users to download updates at regular intervals. (If you are using a server-based program, as described above, these updates take place constantly on the host computer, so the user need not do anything.)

A few packages are available that use a "can-list" approach; that is, the filter maintains a list of approved sites, and everything else is out of bounds. The problem with this approach, obviously, is that much of the appeal of the Internet is its seemingly infinite size and the resulting serendipitous surfing.

A more insidious problem with any filtering approach is that such packages block sites based on the publisher’s standards, which may or may not be the same as yours. Many packages allow you some control over these standards—for example, you may choose to block nudity and profanity but not violence, and you may also add specific sites to the list—but even at that, you are bound to some degree by the publisher’s standards. Many filters, for example, allow access to children’s sites even though rock music pervades the site. To parents who find such music objectionable, the filter has a lower standard than their own and allows their children access to sites the parents deem objectionable. Similarly, if the publisher decides to block sites mentioning the word abortion, the user will be prevented from accessing both pro-life and pro-choice sites, a result that the parent or teacher may not have intended at all. As a relatively silly example, a science professor at Bob Jones University, Dr. Bill Lovegrove, has site-blocking software on his home computer. The program he’s using originally wouldn’t allow him to search for his own name or even to access his personal home page; it found the name Lovegrove just a little too sensual, apparently.

The problem is compounded by the fact that for competitive reasons, the publishers of filtering software do not disclose the details of their blocking policy. They have justifiable economic reasons for this, of course, but it makes the user’s job more difficult.

Another problem with filtering software is that it’s fairly simple to circumvent. Anyone can sit down at your computer with a boot disk and one of those ubiquitous "Free 30 Days" disks from a national ISP and get around many of the most popular filters, both client- and serverbased. It’s foolish for a user to rely on filtering software as his sole means of monitoring usage and preventing abuse. Your school or family should have a comprehensive Internet safety policy that includes all of the techniques mentioned above. Within that larger picture, filtering software can play a useful role.

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Dr. Dan Olinger teaches in the Seminary and Graduate School of Religion at Bob Jones University.