The original impetus for PICS was to allow parents and teachers to screen materials they felt were inappropriate for children using the Net. Rather than censoring what is distributed, as the Communications Decency Act and other legislative initiatives have tried to do, PICS enables users to control what they receive. PICS labels can describe any aspect of a document or a Web site. The first labels identified items that might run afoul of local indecency laws. Another organization, SafeSurf , has developed a vocabulary with nine separate scales.
Labels can reflect other concerns beyond indecency, however.
A privacy vocabulary, for example, could describe Web sites' information practices, such as what personal information they collect and whether they resell it. And various Web-indexing organizations could develop labels that indicate the subject categories or the reliability of information from a site. Labels could even help protect computers from exposure to viruses. It has become increasingly popular to download small fragments of computer code, bug fixes and even entire applications from Internet sites. The vocabulary for such labels might indicate which virus checks have been run on the software or the level of confidence in the code's safety.