GetParentalControls.org

Matt Villano address the complex topic of filtering in public schools in THE Journal, and I’m quoted:

David Burt, who runs the blog Filtering Facts, which is dedicated to providing the newest information and research about internet filtering, tells the familiar story about students who were searching for information about breast cancer, but were impeded because their search contained the word breast. “When they are turned up to the highest settings, many of these filters actually block good information, too,” says Burt, who works as a product manager at Microsoft. “For teachers who rely on the internet to help with specific lessons, this can become very frustrating, to say the least.”

This isn’t a new trend.  Back when the they did the Kaiser study on filtering and health information, they found that setting filters on too high a level removes a lot of useful information. The problem is that district technology coordinators would “rather be safe than sorry,” so they turn the filters up high. 

Matt also gives a very insightful view of what has happened to the education filtering since CIPA.  In a nutshell, it’s been commoditized.  I don’t know what market share my once-dominant former employer Secure Computing has now, but I’m guessing it’s quite a bit south of 40%: 

BACK IN THE DAYS before the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act came into being in 2000, choosing a K-12 web filter didn’t demand the kind of careful consideration that is needed today. Between a vendor named Secure Computing, which owned nearly 40 percent of the market share, and Websense, most schools could find a filtering product that suited them. Today, however, as demand for K-12 internet filtering has increased and the price for the technology has dropped, the market has been flooded with smaller, more agile vendors that have developed solutions specifically for the primary education market. Some of the most popular vendors include Check Point Software Technologies, 8e6 Technologies, and DeepNines Technologies, which all sell web filtering solutions. Most products cost less than $15,000.  For districts thoroughly pressed for cash, another reliable solution is the open source content filter DansGuardian. While commercial filters grade content against a banned list of sites, DansGuardian engages techniques such as phrase matching, PICS filtering, and URL filtering. The newest entrant to the filtering space is SafeSquid, headquartered in India. The company offers a software-based filter that addresses content review with the same strategy as a standard proxy server. School districts sign up, and all of their web traffic is routed through the SafeSquid server before moving on to the internet.