What kind of Parental Controls does this site offer?

By Last Minute Vacation Homes

Posted on 07.14.05

Last Minute Vacation Homes is serious about protecting children from inappropriate content. We are also intent on providing a system whereby homeowners can effectively advertise their properties.

It is important for parents become familiar with some basic internet technology, especially those who are concerned about what their children view. Many parents are unaware of the dangers facing children on the internet; allowing children to surf the internet without supervision or restrictions is not advisable in our opinion. As such, parents should get to know what tools are available to help moderate children's surfing habits.

When it comes to this site, there is a process of review for every article and image that the site presents. Every time an villa, article or image is loaded to our server by home owner, it sits in an administrative review board. Within a few hours, one of our administrators reviews the content of submissions and flags the content as reviewed. If the content contains sexuality, violence or profanity, we also flag that fact as well. Images that are flagged as such do not appear on our front page or in our topic directories.

Given the nature of our site, it is highly unlikely that owners will post material that will be labeled as violent, etc.

If an image is obviously pornographic, our administrators simply delete it. If, however, it is not pornography but contains explicit and/or subjective sexual content, we will flag it as such in the database.

We then place a piece of code in the header of every page of this site. It is labeled with a PICS flag, which means that it will alert browsers about the content of the page. Our PICS labels are generated using the ICRA formula.

Parents wanting to restrict what their kids see on this site are advised to learn about using parental controls. Here are instructions to implement content controls using ICRAplus.

First you must download ICRAplus by clicking here. Save the file to your computer in a location that only your computer administrator can access--for example, only in a drive that your kids cannot edit. Follow the instructions provided by ICRA to install ICRAplus.

Now your kids can only view the kind of content you have permitted on this site. Please be wary that filters are not perfect. We strive to make our site as accurate as possible, so we expect little worry about this site. That does not mean that it will be 100% accurate. Furthermore, parents should monitor their kids? surfing habits by checking their browsing history to see if the pages they are viewing are appropriate--especially on other sites that do not enforce content rating!

We do try to rate the content on sites owned by the members on our site, but we cannot catch everyone every time. Our terms and conditions state that members are not permitted to link to pages that contain pornography and other questionable content--this does not, however, mean that all members will abide by that rule.

Parents can protect their children by only allowing sites that have been rated to be viewed. This is still not foolproof since page labels are generated on a volunteer basis by webmasters--and there is not guarantee that a webmaster will be honest.

Educating your kids about using the internet (and educating yourself as parents) along with responsible monitoring are your best strategies to protecting kids online.

We recommend that parents teach their kids some basic information about the internet found on ICRA for Kids.

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