The Whitelists pane allows you to restrict your children’s surfing to only specific Web sites. You can check the box next to “Use Whitelists” and then turn on and off individual lists in the box on the right. BumperCar comes with two lists of over 30,000 sites, organized by maturity level, that have been pre-approved as kid-friendly. You can add and delete Web sites to and from these lists with the plus and minus buttons at the bottom, or use the “Added by User” list if you’d prefer to keep your additions separate.

You can double-click the URL or name of each site in the whitelists to edit them, and clicking “Visit Site” will take you to the highlighted site so that you can view it for yourself. In addition, you can make a whitelist available to other teachers or parents, or as a set of bookmarks in another browser, simply highlight it, click “Export This List,” and save it to your hard drive. Similarly, you can import a whitelist by clicking “Import New List” and locating it on your hard drive.

When you import a whitelist, make sure it’s a plain text file. (If you select “Save As...” in most word processing programs, you will be able to choose plain text as an option.)

The links contained in the whitelist should be written this way:

[URL] Tab [Title] Return

So, for example, you could have a whitelist with these entries:

http://www.apple.com		Apple
http://www.freeverse.com	Freeverse

Create the space between the Web address and the site’s title with the Tab key and then press Return after each entry. This makes sure that BumperCar places the URLs and the titles in the proper fields in the whitelist pane. Whitelists exported by BumperCar will be automatically saved in this format.

Because the Internet is dynamic and ever-changing, Freeverse will host whitelists so that you can share the ones you’ve compiled with other users. Please visit the BumperCar homepage for more information and to contribute your whitelists.

The slider under the “Use Whitelists” checkbox, “Maximum distance off whitelist,” dictates whether users are restricted only to whitelisted sites or if they can surf off those sites by up to five links. For example, if the slider is set to two, a child can visit a whitelisted site, click a link and go to a second site, and then click a link from there and go to a third site, but any links clicked on the last site will not be allowed. A child can go back to the first or second site and click new links, but they’re still bound by the number you set. The idea behind this feature is that sites appropriate for children will almost always only link to sites that are also appropriate for children.

Because the “Distance Off Whitelist” feature allows your child to access sites not explicitly on the whitelist, there is an obvious decrease in the protection offered by BumperCar. There is an advantage however, in terms of improving the child’s online experience. The Web is designed as a large network, and in a similar way to the “6 Degrees of Separation” phenomena, allowing a distance off whitelist of just two will enable your child to visit hundreds of thousands, if not millions of more safe sites then they otherwise could.