Little more: the problems of the children's Internet

As our children immerse themselves in modern technology, they have to face new threats that even their parents are not always able to cope with. Prohibiting the use of the Internet for the sake of child safety in our world is already meaningless - it is an integral part of our reality. For approximately 15% of adolescents aged 12 to 17, the Internet has become the place where they spend a third of their lives. It should be noted that teenagers do not seek to share this new experience with their parents: more than half of the children hide their unwanted actions on the Internet from their parents. And since we cannot constantly accompany children in a new world for them, it remains to rely on automated means of protection.

The problem of protecting children from inappropriate content (this is a strict protection, that is, a five-year-old child who cannot be turned off in two clicks) forms a whole market of software solutions. They are based on two principles of blocking resources: a filter by IP address, which excludes the possibility of opening resources with predefined IPs in a certain “black list” or allowing access only to IP from the “white list”, as well as content analysis, which allows making decisions about block access on the fly in accordance with the content of the page.

Many commercial products combine both filtering principles. At the same time, for content analysis, both open and proprietary algorithms are used, and as “blacklists” - own or third-party constantly updated databases of blocked resources.

The end user has several different ways to obtain some level of protection from inappropriate content.
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First, he can independently install and configure a software filter.

Secondly - to apply for such a service to a third-party provider - an Internet provider who, roughly speaking, will turn on the filter at the entrance to the household.

And thirdly - to use a third-party service that activates filtering on devices (desktop computers, tablets, smartphones) after installing your own client application. In my opinion, from the user's point of view, it’s still easier to go the second way - to use the capabilities of your Internet provider. Although not all currently provide such services, but over time, such ones are becoming more and more.

MegaFon has joined the number of operators providing parental control services to users for quite some time (since 2011), and since last fall, the operator has been gradually introducing the updated “Children's Internet” service in its branches. The first to test it were subscribers of the North-West, Metropolitan and Caucasus branches of MegaFon. And today it is available almost throughout the entire service area, with the exception of the Far Eastern region, the launch of which is scheduled for the coming months (autumn 2016).

The essence of the service is that the user receives the filtering of the content downloaded to the device as a service, i.e. without the need to install and configure additional software. After the service is activated, content filtering is carried out at the provider (MegaFon), and only child-safe information is downloaded to the user device.

The service is based on Entensys User Gate Web Filter, which has already proven itself on the market in the segment of educational organizations, and uses its own regularly updated base of prohibited and allowed resources. In addition to sites that are subject to legislative prohibitions, it includes pages from potentially dangerous categories for children, for example, adult content or various filter bypass tools (anonymous proxies, etc.).

The list of blocked resources is updated daily, including in automatic mode - the sites missing in the database are analyzed and cataloged by servers before processing a user request to download their pages. Depending on the content, the resource may be blocked completely or partially (in this case, individual pages are blocked).

This solution was used in the first version of the service. At that time, independent assessments played a role in the selection, as well as the results of own testing of various solutions using a database of several hundred sites to be blocked (containing pornography, drug information, nationalist materials, etc.).

As noted above, content filtering in the MegaFon service portfolio for subscribers of the mobile network was present earlier. But the updated version of the service , in addition to the previously proposed DNS filtering and working on black / white lists, provides HTTPs traffic filtering, secure search in the main search engines, restriction of banner advertising, as well as checking downloaded files and morphological filtering of unwanted page contents. Thus, adolescents do not have to deal with information that does not correspond to their age and level of perception.



The system operates as follows. DNS and HTTP / S filters allow you to block unwanted resources present in the database, and some inappropriate content units on allowed pages (in particular, banner ads and pop-ups, embedded video and images from resources listed as blocked in the database).



Additional filtering provides morphological analysis. A safe search means that in response to a request to a search engine, which an adult can interpret in two ways (for example, the phrase “wet acid”), the child will not get an unexpected result, or rather, the search results will simply be blocked. Safe search is valid for most popular search engines (Google, Yandex, Yahoo, etc.), as well as for searching inside the YouTube service.



During the update of the service, the operator deployed an infrastructure that provides a traffic filter, in particular, placed a server with User Gate Web Filter in each branch. Previously, filtering was done by sending DNS requests to a single server, which returned an IP resource as a response (if enabled) or a stub IP address (if the requested resource belongs to the list of blocked).



Now work with traffic is carried out in each branch separately. Potentially created infrastructure allows to work with all subscriber traffic, although so far filtering is performed only for DNS, HTTP and HTTPS.



Although content filtering technologies are constantly evolving, today the service has several limitations.

First, it cannot be used in conjunction with traffic saving tools built into browsers (for example, Opera's Turbo mode), which can affect mobile users with a slow connection.

Secondly, while filtering does not apply to exotic data transfer protocols, on the basis of which various instant messengers or computer games can work. Those. a certain level of risk that unwanted information will penetrate the device is still maintained. True, the latter does not apply to messengers as part of social networks, which are mainly used by adolescents - the corresponding pages are processed by a morphological filter, so messages containing non-normative vocabulary will not be displayed on the children's device.

As for computer games, at the moment the service allows you to either block them completely, or cut off only pop-up windows, banner ads, etc.

According to MegaFon, since the launch of the updated version of the service, its popularity has steadily increased. On average, in the regions where the new service is already operational, the number of subscribers has increased by 65%. Naturally, MegaFon plans to develop the service further.

In particular, it is intended to give the parent the tools for more detailed configuration of the service through the Personal Account (up to creating your own black and white lists of sites, in addition to the existing databases).

- It is important for us that our customers not only receive high-speed mobile Internet, but also security guarantees. Especially when it comes to young users. Today, it is not enough just to restrict access to undesirable sites, we need a fundamentally different approach to filtering data. That is why we have updated the Children's Internet service, which allows you to block only unwanted information from the site, leaving safe and useful content open to the child.

- Artem Vilman, New Services Director, MegaFon.



Above, we talked about the so-called “strict” protection - aimed at adolescents who are able to delve into the settings and disable what prevents them from getting what they want. For softer protection (for example, from accidentally visiting an undesirable resource while sharing surfing the Internet with a child), you can not use third-party solutions, but restrict yourself to the built-in search engine capabilities — Google Safe Search or Yandex Family Search or Yandex.DNS.

Safe Google search (like Yandex Family Search) allows you to customize the output of results so that adult content just does not get there. In general, services are similar, although search engines have slightly different settings, in particular, Google allows you to protect yourself from unauthorized disabling safe mode.

Yandex.DNS allows you to replace the standard provider DNS server with an alternative one operating in three modes - basic (without blocking), safe (with blocking of fraud and viruses) and family (with additional blocking of content for adults). In fact, the replacement of the DNS allows you to implement a filter based on the black list of sites, constantly updated by Yandex when indexing resources.

Instead of a conclusion, we would like to note that, following the growing interest of parents in the available means of restricting Internet activity of adolescents, these solutions are becoming more sophisticated, and the updated service presented by MegaFon is more proof of that. The service works regardless of the user's smartphone settings and location. In addition, filtering copes with encrypted traffic. However, no modern technology will replace the consciousness of both parents themselves and adolescents, who need to know what threats they face in their daily use of the Internet.