By Omar Billawala

Raising a high-functioning autistic child is no walk in the park.  Despite my experience with tantrums of unusual ferocity, I was not prepared for the phone call I received at work from my son’s elementary school.  “The Principal needs you to come to the school right now to meet with her and the Sheriff!”  I know my son is capable of aggressive acts and was expecting the worst when I arrived at the school.  So my surprise was great, indeed, when I found out that my son was being suspended because he had used his classroom iPad to show pornographic images to another boy in the class.  As the Sheriff explained to me, my 10-year-old son could be charged with “Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor” for sharing the results.  He said there are filters are in place such that “no 5^th-grader should be able to bypass them.”  The Principal explained that my son had googled the word, “porn,” and had clicked on “images.”  I was somewhat taken aback thinking that virtually any 5^th-grader would know how to do a Google image search.  But, the school was not to be gainsaid and my son was suspended.

The reason why I mention this story is not to complain about the treatment my son received, but, rather, to point out that even schools in Silicon Valley can have a difficult time filtering internet content.  In this particular case, it appeared that by accident, Google SafeSearch was not enabled, which I was told, was shortly thereafter remedied.

SafeSearch can block most highly objectionable content but it is important to understand, as Google admits, that “inappropriate sites still slip through the cracks sometimes.”  SafeSearch, which can be enabled from the Google Search Settings page, blocks sexually explicit content from your search results.  However, unless locked, anyone can likewise turn it off.  In order to lock SafeSearch on, you will need to sign onto a Google account.  The lock is implemented via cookies and, therefore, you will need to lock SafeSearch on multiple times—once for every browser on every account that your children have access to.  Even then, SafeSearch can be reset by the user by deleting all cookies or by setting anonymous browsing (“inprivate” for Internet Explorer or “incognito window” for Chrome).  It is, at best, an incomplete solution.

There are more comprehensive, but also more complex, solutions available, such as firewalls, router website blocking, or by filtering all web content through your DNS server, such as by using a service like OpenDNS.  OpenDNS, because it takes over DNS server functionality has the advantage of being a single point of control for limiting access to websites for all devices connected through the router that is configured to point to it.  It does a site-by-site block and not an image-by-image, or document-by-document filtering so it is a more crude tool than SafeSearch.

The vast majority of parents I ask how they deal with limited access to inappropriate content on the web indicate that they are able to trust their children to make good decisions when online.  I wish that I could be in that camp.