This does start to touch on the area of things I do at work. (I work for a security software company.) Having some experience on the topic, here’s my input:
Have a conversation with your child or children. Be as explicit as you are comfortable being about what’s out there, but definitely explain that the Internet is not always a nice place. Both in terms of content, but also in terms of people he/she/they might “meet”. If anyone is interested, I can provide some statistics tomorrow in terms of the types of encounters children have online, how often they conceal them from parents, etc. I have the data, just not at hand.
The bottom line is that children will explore online, and they will find ways around filters and so on that you set up.
That said, think of it like sex ed. The more prepared and educated they are, the better off they will be.
And, it’s your house. If you don’t want that content on your computers, set up the filters. There are several ways to do it. You can also set up software to share what sites have been visited and so on. So you can supervise, change permissions, etc. At home, think of the filters as a crutch if you use them, but make them a visible one. They’re a teaching aid. Not a substitute parent.
IMO, the conversation and the dialogue is critical. You can’t be with your children everywhere. You can’t load the filtering software or parental controls everywhere. You need to teach them to start filtering on their own.
As far as age goes, as others have said, I’m too young to see what’s out there. Again, you need to teach it.
Went back and re-read the OP. Adding/amending my answer.
To the question “Is my concern appropriate?” Yes, absolutely. You’re just illuminating the top of the iceburg. The internet is a scary place.
Unfortunately, limiting access to content is unrealistic. Hence the flip in the thread from considering your question to whether or not to filter, which seems slightly off topic as I reconsider things.
There are things on the Internet I sure wouldn’t want to see, or wish I hadn’t seen, and if were a parent then I wouldn’t want my kids to be exposed to content I considered extremely upsetting or offensive.
That said, I don’t think it’s really that common to stumble across tentacle porn, snuff videos, etc., if you’re not searching for some kind of porn already. It happens sometimes, but I think it’s been at least a decade since I was blindsided by anything particularly extreme. While I’ve sometimes been surprised by NSFW photos on Tumblr, these tend to be naked pin-up style images. So not the sort of thing I’d really want my 12 year old to see, but not worse than what 12 year olds of my generation could see if they stole a Playboy. It’s my recollection that porn sites used to be a lot sneakier and tried to trick people into visiting them to boost their hit counts, but these days it seems like innocent searches generally produce innocent results.
There are of course people who think it’s funny to trick others into clicking on a link that leads to something gross or disturbing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a 12 year old boy had friends who considered this the height of wit. But if you’re teaching your son to be careful about malware then he should already know not to just go clicking on random links.
One possible solution is to put the computer the kids will be using in a public area. Not only does it reduce the chances they will look for nasty stuff, but it also helps with bed times.
No matter how much you think you are able to restrict your kid’s access to porn, you’re only fooling yourself. The kid has friends. The kid has a cellphone. The kid has access to computers elsewhere. The kid has ways to get around parental control software. I think it’s safe to assume that every 13 year old boy alive today, at least in any first-world country, is already a connoisseur of all the vile filth humanity has ever produced. Believing anything else is just delusional.
That said, the OP’s question is a fair one, and I do wonder the same thing sometimes. I guess today’s kids are guinea pigs in an enormous pornographic experiment. If they somehow grow up to become normal, functional, relatively sane adults, I think we can agree that porn is safe, and finally put the matter to rest. If civilization collapses within the next twenty or thirty years, then not so much.
Yes, I force his traffic through a dual-homed Linux host running a white-listing web proxy package, Privoxy.
Privoxy lets me both white-list and grant certain sites referrer status. So he can not only browse marvel.com, but also reach any site linked from marvel.com. But those sites, while automatically added to the white-list, are not referrers in turn unless I manually change them. So this typically lets him surf unimpeded; very seldom does he get stopped and need me to add a new site for him.
Yes, he has friends. He has a cellphone but no data. He’s got very limited access to outside computers. That may change in a couple of years when he’s out without parents, but at 12 he’s not hanging out anywhere without a parent or other quasi-adult supervision.
And I am absolutely confident in saying he can’t get around my parental control IT scheme.
And when he can, frankly, I’ll feel like’s adroit enough to see what he wants.
Bricker: I think in YOUR case, there’s much more of a risk of your son coming onto the SDMB, seeing everyone here utterly demolish you in debate after debate, and losing all respect for you… how could parental controls prevent THAT?
I would be careful what you assume about the technical capabilities of an eleven year old with time on his hands. Mine worked out a way very quickly to reinstall a partition that would allow him unlimited access. He did not need to as I let the kids have full internet access ( I believe in talking with them rather than trying to be cleverer than them!)
And if he has a cellphone even without data, he can use any wifi he comes across.
The feature of my scheme that shines here is that what he does on his computer is irrelevant: the controls are at the Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 levels.
That will be more of an issue in a few years, perhaps, when he’s going places more on his own. Right now, he doesn’t really travel around on his own.
A warning- unless you are an advanced computer nerd, the assumption that you know enough to outwit a kid is an unwise strategy. Ask your IT technician how kid proof your system is- you might be surprised!
However, there is the side issue that his friend’s parents probably aren’t doing the same thing. He may not see these things at your home, but you will not be able to prevent him seeing it.
I, too, question that “any” 13 year old in the first world has already seen “everything”. But they will encounter a lot of it for sure sooner than later, better have early parental guidance.
We did not have Internet but by the time I was 12/13 I was pretty clear on that there was such a thing as porn and that there could be such a thing as porn parodies of regular media. Not that I was entirely clear beyond “hey, people naked doing uncomfortable calisthenics with their private parts”
Hey, could have been much, much worse. If you’re going to run into porn fanart on line, that’s a pretty high quality tier.
As an anecdotal datapoint, I was looking up some extremely fucked up shit when I was your son’s age (this would have been in the late 90s). Way more fucked up that tentacle porn.
At that age, it was mainly a personal challenge to delve into the most extreme corners of the internet possible and see what sorts of stuff got dredged up. There was never really a point where I felt like it was too much or that I personally felt overwhelmed or psychologically scarred by the process.
Here are a few random observations:
You pretty much have to be actively on the hunt to find any truly weird stuff. For the most part, people who peddle in that sort of stuff want to keep as low a profile as possible and you have to be actively on the hunt to stumble upon any of it. A tiny fraction of it leaks out onto the larger internet and is used for shock purposes but you have to be hanging out with assholes to be exposed to any of it and the stuff that leaks out is relatively tame. I stopped actively seeking it out many years ago and, I’ve not seen any tentacled penetration in a long, long time.
If you look at the stuff I was looking at back then vs my sexual proclivities now, there doesn’t seem to be any strong correlation. I certainly don’t believe that any of the material I looked like created new sexual perversions within me. Some of the stuff may have helped me discover certain tastes I have now but many people who share those same tastes discover them much later in life, having never been exposed to such material as a child. For the most part, my sexual tastes are pretty conventional despite the range of pornography I was exposed to as a young child.
I had no problems separating fantasy from reality. It was always pretty clear that all of the really weird stuff was pretty ridiculous and that it wasn’t to be taken at all seriously. I don’t felt like being exposed to that stuff, including incredibly misogynistic, hateful material, ever affected my views towards women or other people. If anything, it was the more conventional stuff like the books we read in class that shaped my views on society way more because they came with the imprimatur of respectability.
It moved very quickly from shocking to mundane to boring. One weird image might stick in your head. After you’ve seen enough of them, you very quickly become numbed and nothing becomes shocking anymore.
My imagination could very easily top what the internet could provide. In fact, the oft-touted rule 34 turns out not to be very true. I was often surprised by how tame the internet appeared to be compared to the random fucked up shit me and my friends could imagine on a daily basis.
The one effect my early explorations did have upon me was an extreme bent towards tolerance. It helped normalize the wide diversity of human difference upon me and I never really understood homophobia, transphobia or any other sort of sexual fetish shaming. Even today, when I read sexual advice messages that are of the type “I just discovered that my SO has sexual fetish X and I’m so disgusted, what do I do?”, it’s not a feeling I can particularly identify with because I’ve seen the broad spectrum of human sexuality from childhood.
In any case, you don’t have to trust my single datapoint. Fortunately, we’re reaching the point where the first generation of kids exposed to extreme amounts of internet pornography at a young age are moving into their mid to late 30s. Many of them, due to their early adoption of the internet, later moved onto becoming technology professionals are I end up interacting with many of them as my peers. For the most part, they’re middle class professionals raising families and living fairly well adjusted lives. They may be more tolerant of eccentricity and more willing to be iconoclastic but they don’t appear to have turned into depraved freaks in any large number, nor do any of them really report being traumatized by the process. If anything, the intense social isolation that forced many of them to turn to the internet in the first place had a much larger effect on their lives that what they happened to find them.
I think, if I were in your shoes, my main worry would be that the filter scheme you’ve set up might inadvertently blunt your son’s curiosity. When I was his age, I wasn’t only looking up depraved pornography, I was looking up everything imaginable under the sun and part of the thrill of the internet was that I follow links with wild abandon to discover something completely new and unexpected. It may seem like such a tiny, inconsequential thing to have to ask you each time to add a site to a whitelist but even a roadblock as small as that can have far reaching consequences on behavior. I can’t imagine I would have explored as much or discovered the things I learnt if I were using the internet under the scheme you have set up.
I’ve described my system here, and so far haven’t heard anyone offer an undetectable strategy that might be used to beat it. I don’t have an IT technician to ask.
Schneier’s law states that “Anyone can invent a security system that he himself cannot break.”
Your scheme works great against a kid who’s not trying to actively circumvent it. But if they’re not actively trying to circumvent it, it’s about as effective as just sitting down and setting clear guidelines and boundaries.
For an active adversary, the sheer ubiquity and saturation of internet at this point makes any assertion of access control trivially and laughably false. There’s simply no way, despite your assertions of supervision, that a kid who wants unfettered internet could not trivially get it in one of a thousand different ways.
