CIPA Compliance

The Children's Internet Protection Act, CIPA, is a federal law enacted by the United States Congress in December 2000 to address concerns about access in schools and libraries to the Internet and other information. For any school or library that receives discounts for Internet access or for internal connections, CIPA imposes certain requirements. Further, in early 2001, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued rules to ensure that CIPA is carried out.

More information on CIPA requirements here.

BrightCloud: Helping schools and libraries access the most comprehensive CIPA protection available

BrightCloud's hosted service provides access to information on over 200 million websites – ten times more than the current market leaders. And that number is rapidly growing. Enabling educational institutions to implement policy on such a large set of websites results in greater protection for minors, more accurate monitoring of their activities, and enables complete reporting of online activities as required by CIPA.

How BrightCloud and our OEM Partners Contribute to CIPA Compliance

As an information source, BrightCloud relies on our OEM partners to implement CIPA policy enforcement and reporting. There are several key areas where this collaboration contributes to CIPA compliance:

Obscenity and Pornography Filtering

BrightCloud and our OEM Partners allow schools and libraries to manage Internet access to over 70 URL categories including Adult Material, Questionable, Hacking and other topics pertinent to CIPA.

Best-of-Breed Web Filtering

By integrating with BrightCloud's leading website information service, our OEM partners are able to deliver the most accurate and up-to-date web filtering service with over 200 million URLs categorized.

Proxy Website Coverage

Today's students are very technology savvy. A typical method for circumventing web filtering solutions is to find a proxy website. Proxy sites hide the ultimate destination of the web browser from the web filtering solution, potentially defeating it. BrightCloud maintains an up-to-date and comprehensive list of proxy websites in the Proxy Avoidance and Anonymizers category, mitigating the exposure to inappropriate material accessed through this class of websites.

Security Protection

The Internet can be a dangerous place, as websites can contain spyware, malicious downloads, and other security threats. By integrating BrightCloud into their security solutions, our OEM partners can mitigate exposure of their customers to sites with worms, spyware, phishing, and other threats to personal information, helping to meet the CIPA requirements for protection of a minor's personal information.

Monitoring

When BrightCloud is integrated with our OEM partner solutions, educational organizations have the greatest coverage of web content available, providing greater visibility into the web browsing and online activities of minors.