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N2H2 Drops Plans to Sell Student Web-Browsing Information
ilsa writes "And so it turns out that members of the Slashdot community weren't the only folks bothered by Bess collecting and selling information. Rejoice Oh Protesting Students, and read this story. Bess will still filter the 'net in school (albeit badly from all accounts), but the company will no longer sell information about what sites you visit. The decision was billed as a "mutual agreement."" See also the FOIA request filed by EPIC for information about the DOD's involvement with N2H2. Here's our previous story on the subject.
They were going to purchase some of the reports, to see how kids were surfing through the US military sites. According to the article, the DOD thought the reports came from a valid market research study (i.e. they thought the kids knew that they were being studied). Once they found out where the reports really came from they backed out really fast....
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
It's fascinating how differently people react to privacy issues in the digital world. Your normal purchasing information, credit card useage, juvenile criminal record...all these are tracked by companies in the real world. Who's protesting that?
Exactly - why aren't you Americans protesting?It's different over here in Europe, where we have much stricter privacy laws. I am constantly amazed by the way Americans give up all of their privacy to corporate interests.
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You may like my a cappella music
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I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.
Yet let a company try to sell your data in the digital world, and people start up a big hue and cry.
These "clueless" companies try to apply the rules of the real world to the information superhighway, and get burned. Real world business practices aren't the rules of the road--yet. But as the web grows more mainstream, EPIC, the EFF, and the like could grow irrelevant. And people will have just as low expectations for privacy when they click on a link as when they shop at Foley's.
You know what? It is a matter of time before companies know everything about your behavior online. Marketing is the most important part of getting your product sold, and this is too big an opportunity for businesses to ignore. Unless we have the government step in with strong laws to protect our privacy. It's unfortunate that a concern for privacy goes hand in hand with libertarianism.
I wonder who else might influence the lists.
See my report
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - censorware and privacy/anonymity
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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Bess does not filter by keyword, except
for search engine queries and results.
They filter by site URL.
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For the "el-cheapo" service offered
to schools, there are only a few
combinations of categories available.
I've posted a recent copy of their list at:
http://pillars.net/~bobv/N2H2/categories.html
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Bess catches a lot of flak for inaccurate
filtering becase people assume that if a
site is blocked, it's because Bess thinks
it is porn. Porn is only one of the
42 available categories. Another is
"Free Pages", which is on the
default blocking list for schools.
Reason for that is free webhosting
sites change so frequently that they
can't hope to keep up with them all,
so you get the option of just blocking
them in their entirety.
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Since Bess is a proxy service, your
local network administrator should be
able to allow exceptions to the filter.
If you use Squid, the relevant keyword
is "AlwaysDirect".
(No, I don't work for them; just a happy customer)The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Goldblatt said that no personally identifiable data about kids were ever collected or sold. Federal law prohibits collection or sale of a child's personal information without parental permission.
Yeah, well federal law also prohibits the reading and interception of personal correspondences through the postal system, and yet doing so with my email (boring though it may be) is fine. If they feel like it, lets face it... they'll do it.
Anyone foolish enough to believe that the government of their nation would not willingly and happily sell you out for it's own purposes... well, if you're that foolish I have some really peachy real estate in Florida to sell you.
If you told anyone at the DOD or in politics that selling information about kids or selling their own grandparents into slavery would further their careers, you'd hear two sonic booms. One from Granny and Grampy being wheeled to the auction block, and the other from some lackey pulling data on what sites Junior looked at in school that day.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Is Bess blocking something you think is stupid? Your best bet is to blame the Bess administrator, not the software itself. Bess is comprised of a wide variety of filter lists (more than 40), spanning a huge number of topics. Many of those topics are innocuous in some environments, but are included because certain types of organizations might want to block them (for example, a corporation might reasonably want to block internal access to resume boards, but it would be genuinely ridiculous for a library to do so). It's certainly possible that a Bess administrator will enable blocking lists that are far, far too strict for the purposes of the filter. Bess really wasn't designed for an environment where -all- categories were enabled, but I could see some inexperienced admin selecting all of the block lists.
Also, people often get the wrong idea why a site is blocked by Bess. Let's say, for example, that I wanted to access a home page containing nothing but the text of the Bill of Rights on Geocities, and it was blocked! Clearly a ploy by those fascist bastards at N2H2 to dismantle the very foundations of our country, right? Nope. Turns out that the Bess admin at the site happened to turn on the filter list of "free web site companies," so all sites at Geocities was blocked. Why would they do such a thing? Because porn can be posted at Geocities (and then taken off by GeoCities admins) covertly and quickly, before the N2H2 staff would have time to review the page and add its individual URL to the list.
Bess is in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Nobody's found a filtering technique that doesn't take some of the wheat along with the chaff. As such, admins could be overly restrictive, doing a great job of blocking out porn -- but blocking some legit stuff along with it. Or, they could be sensitive to their free-speech lovin' users' concerns and try to be less restrictive -- and then get sued by a rich lawyer whose kid decided to try typing in some random URLs on Angelfire.
So, don't blame it all on Bess. It gets a lot of bashing, but it's a more flexible filter than any other content filtering product out there. If you've got a beef with it, don't yell at N2H2, yell at your local admin. They can do more about it than you might think.
Assuming they have a brain, of course.
Eschatfische.
The people who participate in Nielson research sign a contract and are compensated. Nielson has the permission of the parents to collect information on the children.
That is why you see commercials for sugary breakfast cereal during Saturday morning cartoons, and commercials for phone sex in the middle of the night on USA. There is nothing wrong with this type of advertising. It does not infringe upon your rights in any way.
So, you're telling me that you wouldn't know that kids watch Saturday morning cartoons and adults watch TV in the middle of the night unless a pollster told so? Did you remember to screw your head on this morning?
Second, the schools involved are providing computers and bandwidth connected to the internet free of charge.
Wow, three for three, what happened to being rational? Where do you live that you don't pay taxes?
My school implimented bess 2 weeks ago. In less than 10 seconds I had defeted it.
The first and most obvious way to get past bess is to simply tell the broweser not to use a proxy server. Since the school in question uses deepfreeze it was a simple matter of going to tools, internet options, and the connections tab. Click lan settings. Then uncheck use a proxy server.
Through basic reserch I figured out that bess simply has a list of web sites it wont let you go to. There are ALOT of websites this list doesnt include that can be used as gateways to other sites. EX: Use www.MSN.com to get to www.hotmail.com. and it works fine.
On another intresting note it seems that bess appends its information panel to any page containing a pearl script, can anyone confirm this?
Jainith
Junkbuster? Just a thought it's what I use at home because there is some stuff I just think my 5 year old is not ready for yet. But it should be open and transparent this is my problem with the commercial systems.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
""Prior to the news articles that were recently published, we believed that Class Clicks was a commonly used market research service," reads the February letter from W.S. Sellman, the Pentagon's director of accession policy."
That one Simpson's episode where they started using the school as a big focus group was supposed to be funny and point out that doing such things was a *bad* idea. It would seem some people in the government think this is normal and as long as many other people are doing it so should they. Anybody have good links to home school resources?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
But they are charging us the parents to set these things up in the form of taxes and in fact they ar e chargning all people who pay taxes so yes we should have a right to complain about what they do with the connection. Now I thank those of you who do have children for helping to pay the cost of my kids education I understand that I'm not in this alone. But I think we should either be given a cut of the money that is made from my children's use of a connection that we have paid for.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Problems: 1. They were doing it without the knowledge of the users. The Nielson Rating Corp pays the ppl who are a part of their research project. They sign wavers to their rights that allow this private company, Neilson Rating, to use the information they gather. 2. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free internet connection. My tax dollars support public schools which in turn pay for their internet access. My tax dollars also pay for the software that filters they internet connection. If the software had been supplied in exchange for the rights to sell "Class Clicks" then this would not be an issue. This was not the case. Bottom line, from what I read N2H2 was selling infomation that it never had a moral right to sell. They got caught and now will claim to stop doing it.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
We can at least take courage in the fact that not all of the citizens of the US are sheeple, and that people CAN make their voice heard. Remember this, folks. People complaining made this happen. There's still hope for us in other causes. Being silent wouldn't have made this happen. Only by making nooise did this get stopped. Though, I do have to wonder, will they be doing this anyway, on the sly?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Bess comes equipped with an override capability which requires a username and password. Your bio teacher friend should, in theory, have access to that password. There is one other way to circumvent Bess, but I'm not at liberty to divulge it since I have to work with it on a regular basis (as an admin) and I really don't want to undermine my job security.
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Something cleverWell since this is such a slow /. article, and because it may give you the false glimmer of hope that this world isn't quite as screwed up as you thought, here's something I read today:
School Cracks Down on 'Hugging Epidemic'
Discuss amongst yourselves..
Try using SafeWeb, or any other anonymous browsing site. Most will probably be blocked, but you can probably find one that'll work.
My school blocks http://www.safeweb.com, but not https://www.safeweb.com, so I can still use the site with a secure connection.
Having been an admin at a small ISP which offered a separate Bess service to customers, I can say the above may not always be the case. The data collected through the filters is completely traceable right back to the users account on the ISP. Granted, *initially*, they were probably stripping off that information so that the marketeers had no tracing ability. But what if, down the road, the DOD was concerned why it was getting so many hits on certain website...it wouldn't take much to get the information it needed.
On a side note here, if i remember right, Bess always claimed to have 200+ people who personally reveiwed pages in order to distinguish between pr0n sex sites and biology-sex sites. Then these pages are placed into similar sounding categories. Therefore, the admin has typically around 3-4 dozen categories that sites fall into and can block or allow any combination of these categories. Above someone mentioned about not being able to reach biology related sites. I wonder if their admin is lazy and is using the default 'block all categories' setup. We didn't have these problems at our ISP since we paid attention to the categories and set the proper status on them. Also, at the specific site, you can allow certain sites to go through that may otherwise be blocked by a category.
Students do not own the connection, nor do they support it in any way, therefore, students should not be able to make decisions regarding the management of the school's internet connection.
Ok, so as more and more assignments require accessing information over the Internet, the students become tied to using Internet access to acheive this information. What of the students whose families are unable to provide Internet connections or decent computing power at home? The students only recourse is to access the information through the schools computers (or a library...but they are under the same filtering scheme most likely) and thus become subject to the targeted advertising. The schools are providing a free service, yes, but they are requiring their use more and more...so the students should have a say in how things are managed. If the only reason the Internet access was in school was to provide entertainment surfing during non-class-time, then your point might have a bit of worth.
Not your normal AC
Now, I dont think that you understand some
of the objections.
They are selling (making a profit)
information about someone. If someone
makes a profit off of information collected
for me, I want a cut. Example: if i volunteer
for a research study, I get cold hard cash.
And, actually, if they are paying for it with
government (which represents all of us, at least
in theory) money, then we have every right to
have a say in the use of information. And,
personally, I object to the rampant commercialism
in America. And I certainly object when data
concerning me is used by a corporation to
further their profile's.
The schools are not providing something free of
charge, they are charging the goverment who, last
time I checked, are takeing about a third of
my paycheck.
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Check out www.peacfire.org you might also take a look at this.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Schools need money.
The software can keep stats of site usage.
Company was selling data.
People got angry. Company stopped selling data
School still needs money.
Company goes back to selling data, school gets a cut of the gross sale.
School district doesn't raise taxes because of new revenue and silently ignores the loss of privacy.
Here is a list of some (all?) servers they use. Just set your browser to use one of them like a proxy server (since they are).
Funny thing, when useing Bess, that page is blocked!
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I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.
My friend, a high school biology teacher, has asked me to try and do this. Bess blocks any sites that it thinks refer sex. This includes good material on anatomy, cellular division and genetics. It pretty much renders the internet useless for biology teachers.
Has been pretty bad. The ISP I used to work for was pressured constantly by community religous leaders and 'society' folk to impliment filtering of porn sites so that their kids couldn't get to them. The ISP rigourously refused despite the fact that one of those society folk was one of the big shareholders. Finally, when N2H2 came out, we signed a contract for them to provide proxy filtering service. For a week or so before we added 'Filtering Service' for an extra fee for customers who wanted it, we tested it internally by browsing with it until it wouldn't display a site we wanted to go to and then using another browser to figure out if the site was banned correctly. It was pretty miserable. It banned all of my art pages (http://www.furinkan.net/art/)(which have some non-photographic nude images), yet did nothing to filter out some of the worst hard-core porn. R-rated Fanfiction? It would trash it every time, but Nerve Magazine went completely unfiltered at the time. I dunno if this is still the case since I haven't used Bess since the testing period. At the time, it seemed to unfairly ban *most* anime pages. After the testing period, the ISP announced the filtering service for availability. We had many, many customers calling in, interested in the service, but when we explained that it couldn't tell the difference between them and their children and/or spouses, they promptly lost interest. By the time I left, less than a year later, we had a user-base of around 40000 dial-in accounts. Less than 20 of them used Bess.
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