What does a former public servant and ambitious young entrepreneur do after gutting New York’s welfare system? Start a dot-com, of course.
But when you’re Richard Schwartz, architect of the city’s workfare program, welfare-to-work corporate juggernaut and bugbear of city liberals, you don’t start up just any old Internet business. Ideally, it must be ideologically simpatico and take advantage of your friendships with powerful conservatives to boot.
In a phrase: Internet anti-porn technology. His new company ClickSafe, launched last week, offers software that uses state-of-the-art algorithm technology to prevent kids from looking at naughty websites. The program sniffs out not only forbidden words, but “the configuration of flesh tones,” according to the company’s press release. And, in a feature that will no doubt interest Clarence Thomas and the religious right, the program can even be adjusted to block sites that feature lingerie. It’s free for individual users, for now. To download, go to www.clicksafe.com.