Inside Internet Filtering

Yesterday Google announced its new Google TV platform.  Given our recent expansion into online TV filtering the first thing that popped into my head was to wonder about parental controls.

This morning I find an editorial by Lance Ulanoff, PC Magazine’s Editor in Cheif, asking 8 Big Questions about Google TV.  His 3rd question is: What about parental controls?

With the whole Internet now on your biggest and best screen, parental controls become more important than ever. Google never talked about how, without any kind of security software on these boxes, you’ll be able to filter out bad and offensive results. Before you race out and buy the first Google TV device this fall, you may want to check that you can either filter results or simply lock down the system so your children can only use it when you’re around.

Parental controls need to be a basic feature of any new platform emerging today, yet most companies totally bypass this area of social responsibility.  Consumer electronics manufacturers need to provide the security industry with the hooks necessary to build parental controls, or build them into their products themselves.  Not doing so is irresponsible and endangers our children.

Each manufacturer building parental controls poses another problem though.  A parent has to learn the controls available on each device, which is a difficult undertaking.  The solution here is for the manufacturer’s to expose these controls to parental control software developers via API’s.  This then allows the existing products on the market to create a consistent parental control experience for parents across all these new devices.

You can see this trend starting to appear.  In Safe Eyes 6, we added integration with iTunes parental controls for the types of music and video content a child can access.   It is a great example of the future role of software like Safe Eyes, to help parents navigate the myriad of parental controls on the market.

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