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The Plain Facts About Internet
Content Filtering When
we first published CYBERsitter in 1995, we were one of 3 companies with
actual working, shipping products. Now it seems like everyone wants to
provide Internet filtering in one form or another. What product to use can
be confusing to the consumer. We feel that this is a very important
decision and our prospective customers should have all the information
possible available to them. Free
Products
Basically the old adage applies here, "You get what you pay
for". There are a few so-called free internet filters or
filtering services making their way into the market, and we are sure there
will be more to come. Even though they may appear to be free, they come at
a price. People do not work for free and there must be some pay back of
some sort to cover the companies expenses, and least of all, to make a
profit. We can assure you that the research and development necessary to
provide you with comprehensive and state of the art products is very
expensive. With free products and services you will loose and here some of
the reasons why:
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No incentive to keep
you as a customer.
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Inadequate, slow, or
non-existent support.
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Limited (token) filter
capabilities.
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Poor technology.
So why would some other
company make a free product available? Probably to sell you something
else, or an upgrade to the "Special" non-free version that has
the capabilities you really wanted in the first place. Or possibly to get
information about and sell it to other companies. One way or another it
will cost you in monetary terms, convenience, privacy, or capabilities.
You can be sure that they have a profit motive. We have a profit motive
too, but we make our profit selling CYBERsitter and nothing else. Family
Friendly Service Providers
Family Friendly ISPs are popping up all over the place it seems. Many are
similar in pricing to normal, non filtered ISPs. So why not use these
services? There are many reasons.
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They can be easily
bypassed. Say you subscribe to a Family Friendly ISP. Well,
there are about a half dozen free Internet Service Providers on-line
today. It takes about 2-3 minutes to get a free account from one of
these services and no age or user verification is done whatsoever.
Your kids sign up and just like that, no filtering. It's that easy.
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No user
customization. You cannot choose which filters you use, add or
override blocked sites. You cannot add personal information or see
violation logs. Plus, there is no way to turn it off! We know from
experience that every users needs are different. That's why we offer
24 different filters and lots of user options.
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Same settings for
thousands of users. As above, you cannot customize settings to
suit your own preferences. The ISP will decide what hundreds if not
thousands of families will have access to and what they will not.
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Slow access speeds.
When you install a filtering product on your own computer, it is doing
all the work for you locally. A ISP will route thousands of users to
the same server for filtering. This means that there may be several
hundred requests to view a web page ahead of yours. Even though
powerful computers allow this to be done very quickly, it is still
going to degrade your access speed. There is no question about it.
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Reliability. How
long has the ISP been in business? What expertise do they have in
filtering? How many researchers are looking for bad sites? How long do
they take to respond to support problems? What happens if you need to
get to a web site that is blocked? What guarantees do you have that
they will be there a year from now?
All of these things add up
to a very poor choice, in fact probably the poorest choice for filtering
Internet content. We believe it will be unprofitable for the ISP and that
they will be unable to support these kinds of services properly. Apparently
the big service providers think so too. Because none of them offer
filtered access. Internet
Filtering Software
This is by far the best choice. CYBERsitter, and a couple of other
products have been around since the beginning of Internet as we know it
today. In Internet years, that is a long time. We have as much, if not
more experience than anyone in the industry in the field of Internet
filtering. With CYBERsitter, you get all the services you need, top notch
support, reliability, and no smoke and mirrors. CYBERsitter does what we
say it will do, and it will do what you need.
How does CYBERsitter compare to other filtering
software?
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