The banner ad was for an online Casino. That was over a year ago. More recently was an incident involving Winnie-the-Pooh icons that returned a citation that I'm sure Disney would not approve of. So much for family friendly. In each instance email to the company produced no response.
So tonight I'm at AltaVista and notice the Family Filter option, right there on the front page, and decide to test it in my usual manner. Turning the filter on placed a lovely red A+ at the top of my screen so I can relax knowing I'm in Family mode. I searched again for one word that begins with the letter F. Of course I spelled it out. This time I received 3,111,010 hits! There was a link at the right offering to take me to Amazon.com for books about F. Family friendly indeed. An email to AltaVista has gone unanswered.
It concerns me when companies say "Family Friendly" or quot;Family Filter" because many people will assume that they are not going to see things they don't want to see. Is that a simplistic assumption on their part? Maybe, but that is what is apparently being offered. A better approach might be a small tutorial on how to limit your searches to avoid undesirable material. This would leave the individual Web surfer in control of what is and isn't offered from the search engine. (Please understand, I know that what is undesirable to me may not be undesirable to you.)
Some people think any filtering is censorship. I don't view it that way. Filtering does not prevent you from saying your piece, it only enables those who don't want to hear it to avoid it. This assumes of course that it is private companies or personal programs doing the filtering. I don't want the government in the filtering business! Does this mean I want to repress people and limit free speech? Not at all. I believe the Internet to be a great resource. I just want it to be a good resource for everybody. I'd like to have my 5 year old sitting with me while I search for Winnie-the-Pooh icons and not have to worry about what is going to show up in the search results. So be aware that "Family Friendly" may not be.
