By Rachel Chalmers
Webmasters can now find out whether their sites are included on Secure Computing Corp’s SmartFilter control lists, and can appeal unfair listings. In SmartFilterWhere, Secure has built a kind of anti-Yahoo – a team of technicians who manually check sites for inclusion in the control lists. The company boasts that it has checked 500,000 URLs, representing multiple millions of web pages. What’s more, because SmartFilterWhere is URL-based rather than keyword-based, a breast cancer information site won’t accidentally end up on the pornography control list. We are the only enterprise filtering company using this type of system, says Secure’s Ken Montgomery.
SmartFilterWhere consists of 27 control lists which are updated every week. Customers don’t purchase a product so much as a subscription to those lists. Topics include sports, criminal skills, pornography and online shopping. We’re not telling people where they should or should not go, Montgomery says. Instead, with SmartFilterWhere, IT directors: can prioritize for themselves where their employees go. For many companies it’s a matter of limiting their legal liability. Access to pornographic sites brings up a lot of sexual harassment issues. Add to that the question of employee productivity and problems with computing infrastructure when big downloads slow down the network, and a non-censorious case for SmartFilterWhere begins to emerge.
We want the software to appear benign and innocuous, Montgomery explains. Employers don’t want to be ogres. They’re not looking to catch employees so much as to disincent employees from going to sites that really aren’t work-appropriate. As such, SmartFilterWhere boasts a new feature: different networking priorities for different groupings by department, by hours and by categories. The IT director can make access to sports sites for all employees between 8am and 5pm a low priority. Sports fans still get through, but work-related traffic goes first. Slow download times might bore even the laziest worker. Besides, Montgomery says: Most people understand that they wouldn’t be watching ESPN at work.
Pricing for SmartFilterWhere depends on number of users, starting at $100 plus $50 per 50 seats. The company already has over 5000 customers for the product. New legislation requiring schools and libraries to filter offensive sites or forfeit their federal money could help that business grow. But Montgomery stops short of endorsing Senator McCain’s controversial bill. We’re definitely agnostic as far as legislation goes, he says.
