SaferWeb - Community-Driven Collection Of Suitable Websites For Children

Abstract

Regardless of what you might think about the Internet and its communities, it is an undeniable fact that their importance and the number of users have grown significantly over the last years. They have also come to manage rather complex tasks, as illustrated by tagging communities and similar applications. In our SaferWeb approach, we use a community platform to collect suitable websites for children. Current webfilters for children use blacklist or whitelist approaches. However, blacklists only block already known websites and thus, finding and adding new sites is a time-consuming manual effort. Similarly, whitelists only allow known websites suitable for children, and again, the effort required to find and manage adequate sites is immense as well. SaferWeb uses a community to manage a whitelist and thus distributes the effort to many shoulders. In this paper, we present our SaferWeb community and its whole architecture also containing a proxy and a browser toolbar.