Sum-up of compliances

Being compliant with standards means being a quality product. That’s exactly what we are about to discuss in the article below.

SafeDNS helps organizations become compliant with CIPA, IWF, BpjM, HIPAA and other regulations, but for the users new to web filtering, these abbreviations might mean nothing. Whether you are an experienced user or a newbie, the below will clear out any questions you have on various compliances.

Why is CIPA important?

Since the Children Internet Protection Act was passed in 2000, a lot of the online environment had changed. Global digital population is now 5 billion users and counting, but back then in the beginning of the digital era it was about 300 million.

Access to the internet for a lot of teenagers and kids was only available in a school or a public library. Being interested in everything on the global web, students did more than just their homework - the whole internet was opening up for them as the school years were going by. Respectively, the government had to introduce some guidelines for schools & libraries on how to protect the kids from the content they should not see.

That is how and what for CIPA, a document that regulates the exposure of inappropriate content to children, was created back in 2000.

To be CIPA compliant means to guarantee cybersecurity of the schoolkids from obscenity, child pornography & harmful content.

Here is a CIPA compliance checklist.

IWF & Project Arachnid

Being IWF compliant means being against child pornography and blocking all child abuse content online. Internet Watch Foundation has formed a list of URLs to be blocked, and it is constantly updating.
Project Arachnid is also a charity against child sexual abuse based in Canada. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection has already processed 141 billion+ images of child abuse.Those also form the list of prohibited resources that web filtering restricts access to.

BPjM

Similar to the previous regulations, this one comes from Germany. The Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors (German: Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM) is a German federal agency that is responsible for censoring media that is suspected to be harmful to the younger generation. The results of such works are formed in The List of Media Harmful to Young People which includes movies, games, printed resources and audio recordings. Once a piece enters the List, it stays there for 25 years. After this period, it might be left out and thought to be no longer harmful or left in.

Here is a BpjM compliance checklist.

HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is aimed to safeguard PHI, protected health information. Such information may include names, addresses, phone numbers, medical records, or even photos. What web filtering can do in this regard is to prevent a data breach by simply not gaining access to malicious websites at the corporate network level.

Here is a HIPAA compliance checklist.