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.

Comments

Not out of the woods yet ...

[funkman]

Quick facts including my own conclusion

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.

Bess

[DanThe1Man]

Wanna see what Bess block and dosn't block?

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!

_ _ _
I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.

Any way to get past Bess?

[selkirk]

Is there anyway to circumvent Bess?

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.

My Personal Experience with Bess

[Bonker]

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.