In the wake of concerns from privacy advocates, N2H2, the manufacturer of Bess Internet filtering software, has announced that it will stop collecting and selling nonidentifying information on students’ surfing habits.
The U.S. Department of Defense had planned to purchase a year’s worth of school-district Internet-use logs from the firm for use in recruiting efforts. However, after receiving a letter of protest from Gary Ruskin of the watchdog group Commercial Alert, the department announced it was indefinitely delaying its participation in the project, the Associated Press reported February 22.
N2H2 spokesman Allen Goldblatt told the AP his company and marketing-research firm Roper Starch Worldwide had “mutually decided” to end their agreement to provide the Class Clicks lists, which categorized and reported student Internet use. “From our end, this was a distraction for us,” Goldblatt said. “What we do is work on filtering.”
Posted February 26, 2001.