“SAFE BROWSING PROGRAM”

Hungarian program for the protection of our children

Safe Browsing Program was launched in 2008, in the spirit of the Safer Internet Programme of the European Union and the British governmental programme, The Byron Review Action Plan.

The Aim of the Hungarian Program

• is to let widely know, that although internet is an essential tool of knowledge, our children’s mental health must be an important issue as well
• is to attract public attention to the importance of the problem and represent the point to decision makers, education and IT professionals, and parent societies, that the protection of our children’s mental health needs cooperation
• is to help young people, parents and the teachers with specific suggestions, proposals and tools (e.g. screening software) for the sake of safer internet use

The Program is being run by the Safe Browsing Society. The Program is supported by the National Police Headquarters, and the Police Headquarters of Budapest; Symantec Hungary is the cooperative partner of the Program.

The Safe Browsing Program

• In the frames of the Program a proposal has made to parents, teachers and students. The flyer introduces how to use the internet safely in the case of registration, chat, online shopping.
• Schools joined to the Program use specialized screening software.

The software

• screens the content, therefore not URL based,
• contains approximately 300 words, expressions (sexual and pornographic content, obscene words and expressions) – these can be extended freely by the teacher or the parents,
• sites containing those words and expressions do not appear during browsing
• controls chatting by screening the text with the above mentioned words (it warns and prohibits messaging)
• has 2 types: home and net (community)
• has a time-control function (it can be adjusted by calendar)
• can control any kind of computer software (it can prohibit or allow them run)

Model-program

Safe Browsing Program serves as a model. 330 schools with 16,000 computers (10 % of the total Hungarian schools’ computers) have already joined to the Program, and another 3,000 households use the software at home.

International adaptation

The creators of the software are willing to produce the software in different language circumstances. First of all, those words and expressions are needed of each language that carry those harmful content which we would like to protect our children.