WWW Censorship; Web literacy and Protecting our kids. (?)

[Michaelangelica]

WWW Censorship.Web literacy and Protecting our kids. (?)

Today, kids are still way ahead of the grownups who supposedly control their school and home networks. In my informal interviews, I've discovered again and again that kids are a bottomless well of tricks for evading network filters and controls, and that they propagate their tricks like crazy, trading them like bubble-gum cards and amassing social capital by helping their peers gain access to the whole wide Web, rather than the narrow slice that's visible through the crack in the firewall.

 

I have to admit, this warms my heart. After all, do we want to raise a generation of kids who have the tech savvy of an Iranian dissident, or the ham-fisted incompetence of the government those dissidents are running circles around?

 

But I'm also a parent, and I know that it won't be long before my daughter is using her network access to get at stuff that's so vile, my eyes water just thinking about it. What's more, she's going to be exposed to a vast panoply of privacy dangers, from the marketing creeps who'll track her around the Web to the spyware jerks who'll try to infect her machine to the crazed spooks at agencies like the NSA who are literally out to wiretap the entire world.

Internet Evolution - The Big Report - Beyond Censorware: Teaching Web Literacy

[Theory5]

I think censorship is not the way to go at all. No matter who it is. You dont need to censor somebody unless you feel like destroying human rights :-P

I know what you are saying, and I think its better to do something more along the lines of explaining to whoever you are trying to censor, and informing them of the dangers, just like everybody has done by telling their children not to talk to strangers, and what to do when you are lost, etc. Information is always better than censorship every single time. What if your censoring program on your computer crashed one day and somebody got on the internet with no knowlege of what dangers there are, and how to avoid them.

Just my 2 cents