In an ideal world, our children would be able to surf the Internet without fear of discovering inappropriate material, being preyed upon by paedophiles, ripped off by con artists or ‘radicalised' by political extremists.
Sadly that is not the way of the world; the practise of filtering Internet access in school seems to be with us to stay so it's vitally important that schools choose the right system.
A school has many users with different web access requirements which a filtering system must cater for. First and foremost the filter must protect the school's youngest and most vulnerable members yet at the same time it should not unnecessarily restrict legitimate access by older students and staff.
Where some filtering products employ a “one-size fits all” approach, E2BN Protex Local comes with a range of 16 pre-configured age-appropriate 'profiles' covering Primary, Middle and Secondary students, Sixth form and Staff.
In a typical secondary school using E2BN Protex, members of staff can access all YouTube videos, while students, by default, cannot. An 'A' Level Ethics student would have access to sites about vivisection, abolition and other sensitive issues but younger students would be blocked from such material.
E2BN Protex Local filtering can be adjusted even on a per-user basis, very simply via web menus, with all changes having immediate effect.
Many filtering products protect users by simply adding sites to a blacklist; sites and URLs which are not blacklisted pass through the filter regardless of the content. This can result in either a heavy-handed over-blocking or a too-relaxed filtering policy. E2BN Protex is more flexible and more effective because it employs dynamic content checking.
While E2BN Protex does use blacklists, Protex also examines page content, hunting out and evaluating words and phrases from a very extensive list of suspect terms. Even when sites are unlisted, users are still protected from receiving unsuitable content.
E2BN Protex also adds a number of other protective features to student filtering such as VerySafeSearch, file type checking, and image search filtering.