For a second time in a top Canadian ISP, PerfTech is working with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to block Internet access from within an ISP’s network to illegal URLs, in accordance with the Government of Canada’s National Strategy for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation on the Internet adopted in May 2004.  For approximately the past three years, PerfTech has been and continues to provide Cleanfeed filtering to another one of Canada’s prominent ISPs as well.

Each of the following three entities plays an important role in this mission: 

1)     Cybertip.ca, Canada’s official reporting tip line, maintains a database of foreign URLs that have been identified and verified as illegal perpetrators of child pornography or abuse. (Note that URLs found to originate within Canada are immediately handed over to Canadian law enforcement.)

2)     Canadian ISPs are encouraged to implement a filtering application within their network to comply with the goal to prevent online child exploitation and abuse. Currently, eight major Canadian ISPs are committed participants, as well as others.

3)     PerfTech supplies to ISPs the technology that effectively filters and blocks the Cybertip-identified URLs.

Emphasis on Security, Privacy, Performance

To achieve effective filtering, PerfTech focuses on these critical issues:

  • List Security:  To ensure that the identifications of the URLs themselves remain secure, Cybertip transmits the list and regular updates to the ISP in encrypted form, after which they are further compiled and maintained in a non-human-readable format.  Requests by the ISP’s subscribers are filtered under encryption; illegal requests are blocked and noted as inaccessible. 
  • User Privacy:  There is no tracking or logging of attempts to access illegal URLs, strictly preserving the privacy of individual subscribers. 
  • Performance:  PerfTech’s technology does not use proxies or DNS, and is unaffected by the limitations of either.  PerfTech’s high-speed filtering process automatically filters requests from every Internet device connected to the ISP’s service.  It incurs zero latency, preserving high performance and a positive Internet browsing experience for subscribers.  

Reducing Access to Child Exploitation

"This initiative not only supports Canada's mission to protect children from exploitation via the Internet, but also helps safeguard both subscribers and the ISP's network from involvement, accidental or not, with this type of illegal activity," stated PerfTech Sales SVP Jane Christ.  "Our technology is also available and currently deployed in the U.S. using the NCMEC filtering database."