Surfwatch and other Internet ratings systems

[Prentiss Riddle]

> From web4lib at library.berkeley.edu  Wed Feb 14 08:42:25 1996
> Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 06:44:06 -0800
> From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau at crl.com>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: censorship, telecom bill
> 
> I have a question for all of you guys.  I work in a small community with 
> one library.  I am the Children's Specialist.  We are about to offer 
> internet access to our patrons with terminals in the adult and children's 
> departments.   If any of you have internet terminals in children's 
> departments have you put surfwatch or some such contraption on them to 
> limit access.  That seems to be the way things are shaping up here and I 
> would like to know how others have handled it.
> 
> Carol Durusau

Good question, and I, too, would like to hear some practical reports
from the field.

Here are a couple of references which may be useful for the discussion:

   The Internet Parental Control FAQ discusses both technical and
   non-technical methods of limiting children's access to inappropriate
   material, including Surfwatch and other rating schemes:

	http://www.vtw.org/pubs/ipcfaq

   In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a "Rating,
   Filtering and Labelling of Online Content" archive:

	http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Ratings_filters_labelling/


My own two cents: I suspect that rating systems such as Surfwatch
(or non-proprietary, multiple-rating alternatives such as PICS) may
prove to be *fairly* effective at screening out the most obvious
sources of objectionable material.  However, I think they face some
fundamental problems:

   -- They do not address one-to-one communications such as e-mail.
      (What happens when little Johnny in Cleveland starts trading
      dirty stories or pictures with little Janie in Vancouver?)

   -- They may prove easy to circumvent for bright youngsters who
      figure out how to download their own software, access unfiltered
      public clients, etc.

   -- Most worrisome to me: if they *are* effective, expect the same
      technology to be used by repressive governments to control what
      information can be accessed by adults as well as children.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- RiceInfo Administrator, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
-- Home office: 2002-A Guadalupe St. #285, Austin, TX 78705 / 512-323-0708
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