Porn Filtering That Works

There are two methods used by parental control software for filtering and blocking porn websites. First and most common is by keeping a list of porn and inappropriate websites and checking every website visited against the list. Of course the list needs to be kept updated and needles to say it can't hold every website on the Internet with pornographic content. Some porn filtering software has the list on the vendor's severs where it is constantly updated by a team of researches this I think is still ineffective for two reasons: first hundreds of porn and inappropriate websites are added every day so that list can never be complete. And secondly it will unavoidably slow down your Internet connection speed as the porn filter holds back a website being visited while it checks it against the porn websites list located on the remote servers. Not to mention that this will also lead to the porn filter's company having detailed info on your family's browsing habits since every website visited will be sent to them for validation.

Another more intelligent porn blocking method is content filtering. A porn filter implementing this method will capture and scan all web traffic for a defined list of keywords deemed harmful or inappropriate. A big upside of this method is that it only blocks the offending content and not all the websites. For example adult videos on vido.google.com will be blocked but the rest of the videos will still be accessible. This is unattainable using the first method which blocks by the address or site name not content. Yet while this method is very effective it is stricter than the first one and can lead to innocent websites getting blocked by mistake for example educational or medical websites.

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Conclusion

Some parental control software offers both options and some offer a combination of the two. I don't think either method is perfect. In my opinion the second method is more preferable however the first method-blocking by URL or address, is desired in some situations as long as no data about websites you or your family visit gets sent over the Internet.

Porn Filtering That Works

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