A story in the BBC today picks up on a study from UK filtering vendor e-Safe education:
Data monitored from 30,000 students found content from items such as mobile phones and cameras which had not been picked up by filter systems. Researchers from online safety firm, E-Safe Education, say children are still able to access inappropriate content. The government’s technology agency for schools, Becta, said systems were tackling this “real problem”. Students’ data was monitored by E-Safe Education, checking how much inappropriate content was evading the schools’ usual blocking and filter systems. The firm’s managing director, Colin McKeown, said: “A lot of schools have internet filtering, but they may just filter words and text. ”We are seeing a new generation of multimedia content and images downloaded from mobile phones, pen drives and CDs and DVDs which do not always have words attached.”
This is interesting, and I’d love to see the actual research, which unfortunately isn’t on the company’s website. E-Safe is of course engaging in some marketing here by pointing out how their product is supposedly superior to competitors. Based on E-Safe’s website collateral, they are selling a solution that in addition to filtering includes security software that manages removable media such as USB drives on networks, as well as image scanning software. Securing removable media is very good thing to help better secure school networks. But image scanning software has never proved to be a workable solution for “on the fly” blocking – it simply blocks too much good content. (But it is very useful for compiling filtering databases by helping to identify sites that are likely to contain pornography.)
Filed under: Filtering, Filtering Companies, Research, Schools
