URL Filtering - Student Rights, School Rights

[polgarm]

Our school district's attorney just forwarded me this news release: http://www.franczek.com/frontcenter-Internet_Filtering_Software_First_Amendment.html

So that we don't have a similar case against ourselves.  How do we make sure that we are blocking the correct site categories regarding CIPA complaince and equal rights for students?  Has anyone encountered this concern before?  How do you have your filtering categories set-up?

[dyang · Accepted solution]

From this article, it seems that the URL filtering solution in question contained a "sexuality filter", which categorized sites based on the presence of LGBT related content.  BrightCloud does not have such a category - instead it has a general "adult and pornography" category, which it defines as:

Sexually explicit material for the purpose of arousing a sexual or prurient interest. Adult products including sex toys, CD-ROMs, and videos. Online groups, including newsgroups and forums, that are sexually explicit in nature. Erotic stories and textual descriptions of sexual acts. Adult services including videoconferencing, escort services, and strip clubs. Sexually explicit art.

If a site contains material as described above, it is categorized as "adult and pornography", regardless of the sexual orientation of its providers and intended audience.  Similarly, support sites for the LGBT community - or sites where the target demographic is the LGBT community - as long as they are not adult in nature, are not categorized differently than sites for the heterosexual community.  Generally speaking, sites that target a specific demographic are categorized as "society".

More information regarding the various BrightCloud categories and descriptions can be found here.

Hope this helps,

Doris

[mikand]

In my opinion when it comes to URL filtering its better to use "continue" instead of "block" along with followups of reports and speak to/with those who you think are violating your policy.

For example categories to block:

- Malware

- Ads

Categories to warn (continue):

- Adult-and-pornography

If you use userid in your network you could use this to place students in different groups.

For example that the regular group have "Adult-and-pornography" set to "continue" but after a couple of warnings (use report function of your box) the student is informed (and the students parents) and then the student is moved to the more restricted group where "Adult-and-pornography" is set to "block" instead of "continue". Perhaps you could offer this as a service to the parents aswell (if they want their child to be in the "block" group from the beginning).

URL filtering isnt any exact science - whats adult for someone is just some skin for another one. We can take www.playboy.com as an example - their frontpage have less skin than any beach during summertime will show you but still their frontpage isnt accessible if you set "Adult-and-pornography" to block.

There can also be false possitives along with urls which isnt classified or proxyservices to bypass the URL filtering all together.