Website Safety for Children.
by jandrews on Mar.17, 2009, under Web Development
The internet has been around for a pretty long time now. With it’s popularity growing since the early 90s there’s been a lot “what to do” about making it a safe place for children. While I am not a parent, I do see and understand the problem. Searching the web for information for a school report and they stand the chance of being bombarded with advertisements of a sexual nature. They may unwittingly click a link that brings them to a porn sites front door. It’s a problem.
Problems have solutions, and I don’t understand why the W3C or the web browser providers haven’t come up with a solution. I personally don’t think it’s and different than what we are doing with SSL certificates for secure shopping.
There’s a trusted, similar to Thawt or Verisign. The web browsers providers and web server providers know that these guys are only going to do the due diligence, and make sure a website is child safe. The website owners spend $500/yr or something for a certificate. They install it much the same way you install an SSL certificate into the web browser. You are now enabling the parents with a tool to control the content their children see. The browser is set for a certain rating. If a site doesn’t have a certificate for for that rating then the content doesn’t get severed. This includes content linked into a site such as ads from a 3rd party. It doesn’t have to encrypt and decrypt data like SSL it just checks the credentials on the first visit and stores it in cache until the browser closes.
Why is it that we haven’t done something about this? This is an easy technical solution it just needs implementation from the community. We’ve had all these stupid pieces of legislation fail because they restrict freedom of speech. I am glad they have failed because they need to to protect our constitutional rights, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to help parents guard against what their children are exposed too. The internet is sometimes a dark place. Let’s lock those gates so our children never have to enter those dark places.
