About the safeguarding full report
Note: To make full use of this feature, you need a Smoothwall Filter license for the Guardian module.
The Safeguarding feature is designed to detect intentional user activity likely to indicate a cause for concern. To do this, Safeguarding has a number of "rulesets" which define how web content is classified.
Safeguarding looks for results that match and do not match categories and then removes those entries that don't really reflect user intent. Each category is assigned a threat level of either Danger, Warning, or Advisory, depending on the ruleset in question. This allows rulesets such as Bullying to give less weight to content categorized as Intolerance than the Radicalization ruleset, while still maintaining an interest.
The Safeguarding feature can help you with your organization's internet safety legislative responsibilities regarding Internet use. The Safeguarding Full report for various time periods shows if users have breached any Safeguarding rulesets. You can view the breach for each user and an hour of browsing history either side of the breach to see the context of the breach.
Rulesets
Safeguarding rulesets are predefined lists of criteria denoting browsing behavior. These include several categories, both included and excluded, and a breach level. The rule sets encompass existing categories, for example, radicalization includes the terrorism and intolerance categories. The Full report opens with breaches from the Radicalization ruleset, from yesterday by default.
Ruleset list
| Ruleset | Categories | |
|---|---|---|
| Includes | Excludes | |
| Abuse |
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| Adult Content |
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| Bullying |
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| Criminal Activity |
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| Radicalization |
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| Substance Abuse |
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| Suicide |
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- Categories belonging to each ruleset are subject to change and are constantly evolving.
- Even if these categories were allowed, blocked, or whitelisted in a policy, they would still cause a breach if an attempt was made to go to, or search for, a domain in one of those categories excluding educational and medicinal ones.
What Does Not Trigger a Safeguarding Breach?
Because of the vast amount of data that is returned from a single website request, there is the risk that a Safeguarding breach may be triggered where there is no user intention. The following internet "paraphernalia" will not trigger a Safeguarding breach:
- Images that are categorized as Web Search, Image Search, or Connect for Chromebooks
- Search engines
Only the actual search terms entered are used to determine whether a breach has occurred. The returned URLs that the user can choose from are not checked unless the user click through it is unlikely the user is going to click through to every website. For example, searching for "kittens" returns the URL for the Animal Liberation Front which hosts images of kittens, which could trigger a Safeguarding breach.
- Suggested searches
Many search engines try to preempt the search term being entered. This does actually fire off a search in the background, which will return results that do not reflect the user's intention. For example, entering "sextant" into a search engine could trigger a Safeguarding breach for a "sex" search, even though the user wanted information about nautical instruments.
- JSON requests
JSON requests that are not related to a web search are not considered for a Safeguarding breach. JSON requests are typically made by web APIs and not directly through the web browser.
- Web furniture
"Web furniture" is the term given to all the requests made to a web server to return content for a single website. This includes, but is not limited to, stylesheets (CSS), JavaScript files, plugins, and so on.
Web requests made within one second of each other are considered page content or resources, and therefore do not trigger a breach.
Additionally, the following file types are discounted:
- ZIP
- GZIP
- ICO
How Does All of that Prove a User's Intention?
Typing into a search engine proves a user's intent to search for those terms. A page returning a list of URLs as a search result does not show intent.
But clicking a URL, following a link, or browsing directly to a website demonstrates the user has changed their intention to using that page in some way.
But, Why?
The following websites provide further information:
Excluding domains, URLs, and search terms from the safeguarding report
If a reoccurring domain, URL or search term appears on your report that don't want on the safeguarding report, you can exclude these from the report in future. For example, users in a group might do a project about Ancient Egyptian mythology and use the search term "Isis" that is being frequently reported as a breach. You can't add domains, URLs, or search terms to the exclusions list. These can only be added when they have been reported as a Safeguarding breach in the Full report. You can only exclude what has made the breach. You can remove the exclusion on the Exclusions page.
Web Furniture
Web furniture is the term given to all requests made to a web server to return content for a single website. This includes, but isn't limited to, style sheets (CSS), JavaScript files, plug-ins. All web furniture is hidden by default to make for a focused Full traffic report. However, you can expand this view to show all received web furniture requests alongside the breach entry.