Labeling Discussion

 

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•  Acknowledgement: Sincere thanks go to Denny Lancaster owner of the  Talking Hands Award Program who provided the majority of the information within this discussion.

There are two distinct site / page 'content safe' child rating systems these being RSACi ( now part of  ICRA™ which is now part of the Family Online Safety Institute or FOSI™ and SAFESURF™ with ICRA™ using the .RDF format for code inclusion but still permitting PICS labels and SafeSurf™ using the PICS method.

•    SafeSurf™ Web site owners / designers have a choice: they may either label their entire web site within the insertion of one ( 1 ) PICS label into their index page plus add separate labels into pages that do not fit into the criteria of the initial index page label or they may label all web pages individually.

Using a SafeSurf™ PICS code page by page is entirely proper but from a “child safe” perspective, someone wishing to truly have an ease in administering “child protection” for their children or other children would more than likely preferably have the one source designation - like the option for an entire web site versus page by page.

Nothing will take ever the place of parental inspection page by page and on a continuing basis. In addition neither ICRA™, SafeSurf™ or any other “child protection” rating group is any better than those who would inspect, find misclassification of “child safe” and report those findings to the issuing group.

Both Denny and myself remain convinced that to basically determine whether a web site is properly labeled as child safe on the basis of coding placed within the head of a web site, does not and will never take the place of a reviewer visiting each and every page.

But we also realize that once a thorough and complete investigation has been made that there is a distinct probability that a web site may fall out of compliance as first inspected thoroughly this being caused either by PICS or RDF code quality or narrative or even some pictures contained within the web site.

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•    iWatchDog™ At present there are only two ( 2 ) rating systems that are licensed and certified by iWatchDog™ ( ChildSafe International™ ) these being SafeSurf™ ( ICCS™ Certified ) and ICRA™.

Note: PICS Rating of your web site content with  SafeSurf™ is required before ICCS™ Certification submission will be approved. ( SafeSurf™ is the only ICCS™ certified content rating system with a current active license. )

With iWatchDog™ applicants have three ( 3 ) options available -

1. Use SafeSurf™ or ICRA™ voluntary content labeling system to rate your web site content in its entirety.

2. Use SafeSurf™ or ICRA™ voluntary content labeling system to rate the content of each individual page of your web site.

3. ( OPTIONAL ) - Submit your web site to the CSI SafeSites™ Search Engine for ICCS™ Certification and inclusion in the CSI SafeSites search engine. All web sites listed there are PICS la bled and ICCS™ Certified.

Further: If your web site is oriented to children under the age of thirteen ( 13 ) years or collects information from a child who is thirteen ( 13 ) years of age or younger a privacy statement is now a mandatory feature of a web site in accordance with FTC and EU regulations.

iWatchDog™ will, upon valid application, provide the applicant with the correct meta tag content to be inserted into web pages and also provides applicants with emails of Certification plus as stated previously, if the web site is registered under Option three ( 3 ) will also list the applicant web site within the CSI SafeSites search engine.