TEN QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT FILTERING SOFTWARE

Jennifer Cram

© Jennifer Cram 2003. Originally published in Access 17(4) 19-20


QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE COMPANY

1.     What can you deduce about the company’s values?

Because criteria to block content tends to be vaguely defined and subjectively applied, it is important that know as much as possible about the company that owns and markets the product. Filtering companies generally treat information about what is being blocked as commercial-in-confidence. What is blocked is decided within the company, so in effect anonymous third-parties decide what users of the filter will or will not see. While information about criteria for filtering categories is clearly a marketing requirement, the choice of categories and the web sites assigned to them are highly objective. Human error can result in web sites being assigned to inappropriate categories, and the filter could even block parts of your own web site.

Questions that one would ask about any organization one was thinking of entering into a business relationship with are appropriate here, such as:
  • Who owns the company?
  • What does that tell me about what the values are likely to be?
  • What are the values of the community in which the company is situated?
  • How confident can I be that what appear to be errors are not indicators of conservative values?
Generally speaking, the desire to shield children from pornography and gambling is universal, but while gambling is clear-cut, what is defined as pornography is inexact. Only a court of law can determine if any particular content is obscene and political, religious and other values are bundled in with particular social values relating to pornography. Research has highlighted that filtering products are very susceptible to company bias. This bias can include far-right Christian conservative bias, racist bias, gender bias, pro-capital punishment bias or political bias that is not in line with Australian culture.

For example, Peacefire, an organization which promotes open access to the Internet, identified company bias and double standards about anti-gay “hate speech” by copying anti-gay quotes from four different US conservative web sites and creating four web pages of these quotes on free servers. Using anonymous Hotmail email accounts it notified six different blocking companies and recommended that they block these four pages as “hate speech”. The companies agreed. Peacefire then named the four web sites from which the quotes had been taken and suggested that these be blocked. None of the companies blocked the sites, nor did any respond to Peacefire’s enquiries as to why they had not.

2.    How stable is the company?

The filtering market is consolidating. Large enterprises are evaluating using filtering services from web caching vendors who typically license lists and blocking from the filtering vendors. Anti-spam, anti-virus and other types of software vendors are also looking to enter the market. All of this means that:
    • mergers and company take-overs are likely to increase
    • any filtering product you subscribe to may disappear
    • you need to ensure your contract protects you from merger-driven price increases.

QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE PRODUCT

3.    What is the target market of the product?

While filters generally block categories related to sexual activity, nudity and gambling, those produced for the business environment may include categories employers want blocked during business hours which schools may find desirable – such as travel and vehicles.

4.    Is the product client software (designed to be loaded on a local computer), server-based software (designed to be loaded and managed on a network), or is it provided through a remote server?

Client filters can interfere with other software on your computer. Remote filters provide little or no capacity for local control.

5.    Can the filter be configured so that it can be prevented from gathering or storing information that Australian law or school policy prevents you from gathering about Internet use?

Any product that displays and reports user information can collect sensitive data. This is particularly problematical when such information is stored off-site as this raises legal and ethical issues about ownership of off-site data. There has been one widely reported case of the vendors of a popular filter planning to sell children’s Internet-use data to the US Department of Defense.

6.    How confident can I be about the quality and accuracy of the stoplist?

Questions to ask include:
  •  Does the software offer dynamic list-building?
  •  How often does the company update its stoplist?
The stoplist is the filtering company’s bread and butter therefore it is not going to share information about what is being blocked. So, the only way you will know that a site is being blocked inappropriately is to constantly review all web activity, or when someone reports an instance.  Some companies claim to have solved this problem by providing a search engine for determining if a site is blocked. In practice you would have to enter the URL for every site on the Web to be sure. Although claims that no site is blocked without human review the rate of error suggests that sites are blocked by spiders without human intervention. Spiders and filters cannot identify irony or sarcasm, nor can they necessarily discriminate between sites that are, for example, pro-hate and anti-hate. Likewise, the blocking of non-sexually related sites as sexually explicit is either deliberately misleading or just plain inaccurate.

7.    Will I know when a page is blocked, and is it possible to override or circumvent the program?

When pages are blocked silently the user gets a “Network Error” message in the browser. When the categories used are broad access to valuable sites can be blocked.

QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT COST

8.    What is the total cost of ownership?

In addition to an annual subscription or license fee, most filtering companies charge maintenance fees for providing updated stoplists as well as for technical support. There may be internal costs as well for things like additional time needed to monitor and manage the filter, technical help, or upgraded hardware.

QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT SCHOOL PRACTICE

9.    Have we precisely defined what it is that we are trying to protect students from, and what we mean by terms such as pornography?

If you haven’t got defined terms of reference it is impossible to adequately assess products on offer, to defend your stance on blocking access to various categories of sites or to have a standard against which the performance of filtering products can be assessed.

10.    What are we going to do to protect students in areas where filters fail?

No filter can protect children from being preyed on by adults. Paedophile activity is the obvious danger, but hate-mongers can also be very subtle. Although hard-core sites are easy to detect and generally are targeted for inclusion on stoplists, infiltration of chat-rooms, fun-and-games and music sites, and homework help sites that serve up a mix of conspiracy theories, racism, and anti-Semitism or anti-Islam in the guise of historical data can lure children into hate groups.