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Report on the efficiency of 10 filtering tools.
The NetProtect consortium has publicly released its D.2.2
Report on currently available COTS filtering tools. This report
analyses the filtering efficiency of 10 "top" solutions on
a large database including 4449 Urls. D2.2 is available for
download on http://www.net-protect.org.
Context of the work
Started on 1 January 2001, NetProtect is a project partially
funded by the European Commission under the Safer Internet
Action Plan. The objective is to build a European prototype
of an Internet access filtering tool for parents and teachers,
able to filter porn websites expressed in English, French,
German, Greek or Spanish. The project is carried out by a
consortium, which is led by EADS Matra Systemes & Information
(France). The consortium groups together Red Educativa (Spain),
Matra Global Netservices (France), Hypertech (Greece) and
Sail Labs (Germany).
Description of the report
The report presents the results of the analysis of 50 commercial
filtering solutions currently available to parents and teachers.
A clear distinction has been made between 10 filtering tools
and 40 other tools. The first category concerned a selection
of 10 of the most popular filtering tools. This selection
includes BizGuard, Cyber Patrol, CYBERsitter, Cyber Snoop,
Internet Watcher 2000, Net Nanny, Norton Internet Security,
Optenet, SurfMonkey and X-Stop. These tools have been under
a thorough review while the other 40 tools have been under
a succinct review.
The strength of this study is first based on the fact that
the "top" 10 tools have been evaluated on a large
database, which counted 4449 URLs. Second, 5 European languages
have been considered in order to evaluate the filtering capacity
regarding the websites language. The database was therefore
made up of 939 English websites, 866 French websites, 1000
German websites, 683 Greek websites and 961 Spanish websites.
Third, the set of URLs collected for each language was divided
into two sets of URLs in order to evaluate the filtering efficiency
and the overblocking rate of the tools: harmful URLs and harmless
URLs. Finally, we followed the same procedure to evaluate
each the "top" 10 tools. Our evaluation procedure
was based on a list of 12 criteria (effectiveness, usability,
etc.). The evaluation of each criterium finally gave a final
score allowing a ranking of these tools.
Cyber Snoop, CYBERsitter and Optenet resulted to be the 3
best tools of this study according to the 12 criteria used.
Nevertheless, their blocking effectiveness ranged from 46%
to 79% while their overblocking rate ranged from 3% to 25%.
Contact for further information
Stephan BRUNESSAUX
EADS MATRA Systemes & Information
Email : sbrunessaux@matra-ms2i.fr
Phone: +33 2 32 63 40 55
Fax: +33 2 32 63 42 00
Web: http://www.net-protect.org
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