Although this is not a web design related article, I thought I’d write a post that may help other parents who’ve had a similar problem or want to stop their children accessing adult content on the internet.
The internet is an incredible tool for business connectivity, for knowledge and learning, for social interaction, debate and entertainment. It’s free and open – anybody can make a website – and the search engines make it incredibly easy to browse and access whatever comes to mind. This is what has made the web such a huge success. Unfortunately this open accessibility is also what makes the web a dangerous place for children.
In my youth the internet did not yet exist and my first encounter with pornography didn’t occur until I was about 13 or 14. It was relatively mild and was with a copy of “Fiesta” that was brought into school in a boy’s satchel at secondary school.
Recently, my son (who is only nine years old) was exposed to some rather hard-core pornography by a friend on his iPod via a quick search on Google. Luckily he wasn’t really bothered by the video he was shown as he’s more interested in Lego and playing Forza on his Xbox. My three kids have access to the web in our house via a PC and tablet computers. We use blocking software on their account on the PC – but how do we stop them and their friends accessing this sort of content on their tablets?
Parental Controls & Internet Filters
I’d looked at several solutions – apps for their Android tablets and my iPad (that they use), but that still doesn’t fully solve the problem. My kids like to play Minecraft and similar games, and when their friends come round they connect to our router via Wi-Fi and play together on the network. Again the problem arises – how do we block content on their friends’ tablets?
What is needed is a way of blocking this type of content for each computer in the house – i.e. before it reaches your property. David Cameron announced in July (2013) that this type of blocking would be generally available some time in 2014, but initially only new customers of the ISP’s will be asked to make a choice if the filters should be switched on, with existing subscribers having to request the feature.
After l heard this, I looked at the offerings of the four big ISP’s in the UK – BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk.
BT and Sky give you a free copy of McAfee parental controls and Virgin give you Trend Micro’s offering. None of these will protect your whole network. Only TalkTalk (who I personally wouldn’t recommend due to their customer service), offer a filter based service.
A free alternative
You can purchase web filtering technology from several different companies but it can be quite costly, however there is also an excellent free version available from OpenDNS called FamilyShield. All you have to do is change your home router’s primary and secondary DNS addresses to 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123.
If you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, just go to www.opendns.com and select “FamilyShield”. It’s got full instructions on setting up your router, and you don’t need to create an account.
I’ve been using it without problems for a few weeks now. As well as blocking adult content, it also protects against malware and phishing attacks.
By the way, if your kids are older and a bit more internet savvy, it’ll also block proxies, anonymizers, and other tricks that your kids may have picked up to attempt to bypass this sort of filtering, so make sure you’ve got a very secure password on the admin account of your router!
