IT/IS Security - Family Safety on the Internet

Protecting your family on the Internet

The Internet has been likened to the Wild West of the USA in the late 1800's a large, sometimes trackless and often lawless place full of hidden and not so hidden dangers. Whilst this is clearly not true of the vast majority of the Internet, it is certainly true of a proportion and there are many up-to-date examples of children being groomed by paedophiles and innocent people falling foul of identity theft and fraud. This is to say nothing of the amount of pornography that is easily found or innocently stumbled upon.

Of course, this is still only a tiny percentage of what the Internet represents, however, it is a real and present set of dangers that I certainly do not want my family to be unnecessarily exposed to. It is with this in mind that I have produced this page of information (along with much of the related security information on this site).

Whilst it is not really feasible to fully protect your family from all the dangers of the Internet, it certainly is possible to greatly reduce the dangers to a manageable amount and I aim to give you enough information for you to start that process.

Who is doing what, when?

I believe that the first issue to face is: what access to your family (and by that I really mean your children) have to the Internet, where do they have it and when.

For example, do your children have a computer in their bedrooms with full, unrestricted access to the Internet? Perhaps things ended up that way because you are unsure about computers and how to set them up or perhaps because you simply wanted the kids out of the way?

Well I have to say that this is really putting your children in harms way! How many times have we now seen on the news about children running off with someone they met on the Internet or being groomed by paedophiles via it? Sometimes the parents are interviewed and say that they had no idea that this was going on. Is that an excuse that you want to be giving? I hope not.

So perhaps the first thing to do to protect your family is to move the computer into a family room (dining room or breakfast area) and to keep a watchful eye on how the computer is used. How watchful will depend on who is using it (e.g. what age, how trustworthy), how often it is being used (is someone spending every evening in chat rooms), how is it being used (chat rooms tend to be much more dangerous than web sites in general) and exactly where the computer is (is it in an area where other people are constantly in and out).

The second thing to do is to become more Internet and computer literate yourself. That's right, you have a responsibility to your family and that should mean knowing enough about computers and the Internet to know what the main areas of threat are and what to do about it. The good news is that, as you are reading this page, you've made a start!

Acceptable Use

The second issue to deal with is informing your family what is acceptable use of the computer, email, etc. and what isn't. This is not much different to a business that should also be setting AUP's (Acceptable Use Policies). Because if you do not define what is acceptable, you cannot expect to be able to discipline someone who does wrong.

So, what is acceptable use?

There is one thing that should never be acceptable: giving personal details out on-line. This is the first thing that you need to instil into your Internet using family members. The only item of personal information that it should be acceptable to give out is their first name. Not their surname, not their age, not their email address, certainly not their address, probably not even their city. In other words nothing other than first name should be given out without checking first with suitably Internet literate parents.

t.b.c.

Auditing

While this is a very business sounding word, it really only means checking. Checking what your computer/s have been used for recently and checking what has been installed (knowingly or unknowingly).

Although there are tools that will help audit computer use (and even capture information as people are using them), I do not specifically recommend them. As with everything else on this page, you will need to decide on appropriate levels of trust between you and your family and too much auditing may be a step too far. None-the-less, it would be remiss of you not to do some occasional checks on usage. This is made much easier if you have a local server but if not, at least check out the browser history and sent email folders from time to time as well as keeping an eye open when the computer is being used.

Tools to Help

The tools you need to help you monitor and control acceptable use of your computers and the Internet are, on the whole, simply extensions of those you should be using to protect your computers anyway. I recommend some key tool types on the Personal Protection Software page.

You can add to that basic selection if you wish, tools that are specifically designed to protect the family.

These need not all be locally installed. For example, the Google search engine can operate in a "safe" mode that helps to exclude certain content (you need to be aware though that no of these types of filtering is 100% effective). Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) also provide family safe services for email and web browsing. There are also web sites and chat sites that specifically deal with children's content and you should check with your schools and local library to find the best ones and for how to configure your computer to only use "safe" services.

Computer literate parents also have an extra layer of protection that they can provide. Namely, running all household computers through a local server before getting to the Internet. This allows a very high level of filtering and control to be applied on a computer that no-one else has access to. This local server could check all outgoing and incoming emails for key words and phrases and then isolate offending emails (for example, outgoing emails from children with personal details in). It could do a similar thing with web browser requests and even chat connections. I do not really have space on this particular page to go into details on implementing this, it is not especially difficult but it is somewhat involved; there is, as always, plenty of information elsewhere and you can even purchase "boxes" specifically designed to do this kind of thing. As my own family grows up, I will be implementing this in my household so come back in a few years to see how I got on! In the mean time, I will create another page to cover this (when I have time!).

If you do not want or are not able to implement a local server, do remember that you need to protect the settings on your computer/s in order to stay safe. This means using tools that have extra passwords required to change settings and, preferably, using an operating system that allows for administrators (who can change settings) and users (who cannot). This means using operating systems such as Linux, Windows NT/2000/XP but not Windows 3.1/95/98/ME.

t.b.c.

I do hope that this gives you an insight into how to protect your family from the less pleasant aspects of the Internet and I hope that I haven't put you off from using it. Used right, it is an unbelievably powerful and useful resource that can help our children learn faster and smarter than ever before.

If you have found this page to be of use, or if you would like more information, please do feel free to get in touch.

Julian Knight.