Dec 23, 2006

Wi-Fi a new challenge for parents

By Will Oremus / Daily News Staff Writer

It's at Starbucks, Happy Donuts and Best Western. It's at 26 Peninsula libraries. In Mountain View and Foster City, it's everywhere -- and it could soon cover all of Silicon Valley and San Mateo County as well.

Free wireless Internet access is booming in the Bay Area, bringing with it a host of benefits such as better communication for public employees in the field and expanded access for people who can't afford to buy their own service.

But it also poses a challenge for parents who want to protect their children from online predators and other content they deem inappropriate.

Schools, libraries and families often set up their Internet access to keep young children off certain types of Web pages, such as the social networking site MySpace and pornographic sites.

So far, no such restrictions exist on municipal wireless Internet systems, which are available all over town, to everyone -- including kids.

"Those that are considering Wi-Fi are considering it from the perspective of economic value to the community and cost," said John Carosella, vice president of content control at the Sunnyvale-based Web security company Blue Coat Systems. "What they're not considering and not calling for dialogue on are the social implications."

Carosella calls today's parents "first-generation Internet parents" because they don't have the examples of previous generations to draw from in dealing with their kids' exposure to the Web.

Whereas parents routinely take steps to limit what types of TV shows or movies their kids watch, and the government provides rating systems and licenses for such traditional media, the Internet contains "the whole range of human behavior," Carosella said.

Mountain View City Council Member Tom Means said he doesn't recall that issue coming up during the city's discussion about Google's plan to provide its residents with free wireless Internet access.

In the days when his children were young, he said, "the kids weren't so sophisticated yet, and you could look at the history (of sites visited) on the browser and see where they'd been."

The biggest wireless effort under way right now is by Wireless Silicon Valley, a group of cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties that is working with IBM and Cisco, among others, to build one of the world's largest free networks.

Co-chair Brian Moura said the free network likely wouldn't contain filtering mechanisms, because constituents so far have expressed more concern about the potential for censorship.

Palo Alto Unified School District board member Barb Mitchell said that makes sense to her. "It does open up new challenges for parents and kids. ... But my personal opinion is that municipalities should not be filtering content, except perhaps minimally. I would not want to see 'Big Brother' from the municipalities."

The key, Mitchell said, is education. The school district does some filtering but is more interested in teaching kids how to harness the Internet responsibly, she said.

Mark Hudak, school board president of the San Mateo-Foster City School District, said it's a matter of trust between parents and kids.

He said his daughter, a seventh-grader, is not allowed on certain sites such as MySpace, and "I trust her that if she's at her friend's house or at Starbucks with a laptop, she wouldn't be on there."

Hudak added, "I'm not going to rely on some filter to do my job as a parent."

E-mail Will Oremus @ woremus@dailynewsgroup.com.