Of ongoing political interest is a case in Loudoun County, Virginia. A public library there had installed a filtering program called X-Stop , from Logon Data, to stop access to obscene material, but many users complained that the software blocked access to sites dealing with issues such as sex education, breast cancer, and gay and lesbian rights. The software could not distinguish between obscene material and other information that might be perceived in a more favorable light, such as educational material about sexual matters. Similar cases have arisen in states across the country including California, New York, and Texas. Inappropriate in the Office In a corporate setting, the problems are slightly different.
Companies are greatly concerned with the wasted productivity that surfing the Web can cause.
There's also increasing worry over inappropriate behavior, such as viewing pornography sites in the presence of coworkers or downloading and e-mailing inappropriate pictures or articles. Nevertheless, there are fears for workers' civil liberties as some companies filter according to rank, allowing executives to view all sites in unregulated peace while drastically curtailing the viewing privileges of those lower down the ladder. Many filtering products come with a built-in moral code and have inconsistent methods of classifying or filtering out appropriate sites. The latest entrant in the corporate Web filtering marketplace is Content Advisor . Launched this month, its search and filtering product, Content Advisor for Firewall-1, is integrated with Check Point Software Technologies' firewall product.