5.4: Freedom of Information legislation and information access issues

Table of Contents

1. Freedom of Information legislation
2. Acceptable Use Policies
3. Content filtering
   1. Approaches to content filtering
   2. The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA)
   3. Walled Gardens
   4. Suppliers of filtering software
4. Internet safety with younger clients

Walled Gardens

The walled garden approach is often used for young clients. Here, instead of trying to block access to possible unsuitable sites and allowing access to all other sites, the "walled garden" only offers access to pre-selected websites. This is a much simpler approach. Instead of trying to cope with rating or searching through the 8,168,684,336 websites cataogued by Google today, a small number of hand picked sites are allowed to be browsed. Of course the quality of this service relies upon the nature of the vetting before access is allowed.

The disadvantage is of course the exclusion of many potentially useful sites. There have also been issues with e-mail and search engines allowing a hole to be made in the wall.

Let´s look now at some Suppliers of filtering software ...