One of the deepest fears a lot of parents have in this digital age is that their kids will fall into the seedy side of the Internet — or, worse, head there on purpose! When my partner decided it was time to get her kids a computer, I took a good hard look at the kinds of Internet filtering software that were available. To be honest, I find this kind of thing incredibly distasteful — it smacks of limiting free speech, and that’s not really a lesson I think we should be instilling in our children. Yet I also don’t want their lack of experience on the Internet, and frankly their lack of good judgment, to lead them into something they’re unprepared to deal with or understand.

With some hesitation, I settled on and installed K9 Web Protection, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it’s worked. It is not heavy-handed in its filtering, and it offer me the ability to choose which of 55 categories of site I want to filter. The stuff you’d expect is there, of course — porn, sites with foul language — but I can choose some categories I’d have never thought to block, like sites hosted on free webhosts (which may be amateurs, but may also be fly-by-night porn operators). And if it blocks something it shouldn’t, I can easily override the filter either for good (for a site I know is ok) or for the next 15 minutes. K9 also offers the ability to limit Internet usage by specific times, or block certain sites at certain times, but I don’t use this feature. It would be useful for a family that shared a single computer, though — mom and dad can have unfiltered access at night after the kids are asleep, and the kids can have safe access the rest of the time.

Best of all, it’s absolutely free for home users! Other filtering software charges a monthly fee for updates, and is expensive to begin with, and I wasn’t about to pa for software that, as I said, I felt pretty ambivalent about using. K9 makes their money from institutional sales — libraries, schools, and businesses — and I think pretty decently offers the same protection to families without charge.

Our experience has been entirely positive. I’ve had to override the filter only three times, I think — once for a games site that I decided was ok, and once for 15 minutes when my stepdaughter was doing research for a project and I wasn’t sure what the site was she was visiting. The third time was when we decided to allow them to use MySpace (all of their aunts and uncles are on there, as well as their grandmother, so we decided thy could build profiles so long as they kept them set to “private”; I should say also that we keep their PC in a public area where we can easily monitor them. I should do a post on computer safety in general…). The kids know that when they see the K9 page the site they’re trying to reach might not be good for them, and they’re pretty good about figuring out why. What we’ll do when they get older and more computer-savvy and ultimately figure out how to disable the filter I don’t know, but fo now, they’re still new enough to the computer and trusting enough of our judgment that we don’t have to worry.

Related Posts

• Gift Idea: Digital Photo Frame Keychain
• Kidblogging?
• About

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website