77 per cent of women would sign up to a default filter barring pornographic content apparently.

[bunn]

EG in this news story.

Who ARE these women? How were they chosen? Why didn't they ask ME? Have the women they asked experienced the annoyance of finding useful information and innocent material randomly blocked, without, at the same time, actually screening out stuff that makes you go EEEW? (I recently had to replace the 'national lottery funded' logo on an extremely earnest and 100% childsafe website, because school automated filters were unable to tell that the logo did not mean the website was about gambling...)


For that matter if 77% of women (British women, one assumes) think a default filter is useful, then why not just use one?  Why the need for legislation?   Nobody is telling people they can't use filters if they want them, but why should they be default and implemented at the network level?  

 I've got no particular brief for porn, but what's porn, what's art, what's archaeology and what's medical diagrams is rather in the eye of the beholder...  A comprehensive ISP-level autofilter seems like it would be an arsepain.

 I can just hear the calls now from worried clients that have somehow managed to make their own websites accidentally X-rated.   And god help the poor souls on the tech support line trying to sort out the family disputes, or trying to explain why Little Johnny has still managed to navigate his sweaty little mouse to see something of which Mum disapproves... 

 I would of course request that my own internet access should be filterless so I can get to everything I need to, which probably will end up putting me on some sort of Government Deviant List...

Expensive professional porn is mostly behind filters to try to prevent customers getting their jollies for free anyway - or, it always has been when I've been unfortunate enough to have to work on that sort of content. But when it comes down to it, when everyone has got a body and a camera, and a terrifying number of people also have access to Photoshop, the only way to reliably distinguish porn from family photos is telepathy.  Amateurs don't tag or describe content reliably. That's why they are amateurs... 

It says a lot that Talk Talk are the only British ISP prepared to implement a policy of default filtering without being pushed into it by Nanny Government. Talk Talk, presented with a brewery and an eager audience chanting 'Piss Up! Piss Up! Piss Up!' would probably attempt to organise an exhibition of experimental dance, or possibly a nice game of rounders.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think it's a valid question to be asking, but I think a networklevel filter is not an answer to the problem.

I don't think it will effectively protect children, and I DO think it will cause parents and carers to stop thinking about the issue because they assume it has been solved by technology. Which it won't be.

I don't think looking at violent porn is anything like as dangerous as, say, friending people you have never met and know nothing about on Facebook. People are looking the wrong way for the risk.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

> I don't think looking at violent porn is anything like as dangerous as, say, friending people you have never met and know nothing about on Facebook. People are looking the wrong way for the risk.

This is an interesting point and I don't know the answers. One of the issues is that this is a question that affects a wide range of people - not just the educated, articulate middle class who can make informed choices. There is evidence that some people are very adversely affected by viewing porn/violence. Either as a risk to others (copying it in attacks) or to themselves (psychological damage/can't form relationships in real life). I also understand that it tends to be addictive. My own view - and we will probably disagree on this - is that I don 't want to live in a society where access to violent and/or pornographic material is acceptable or even normal (and it seems to be increasingly normalised) because I believe it is degrading to both participants and viewers. If filters mean people have to opt in, rather than a default of opting out, I think that is a good message.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a matter of protecting people who can't protect themselves, I think it's legislation that will create the impression of protection without actually protecting anyone. That seems to me phenomenally dangerous.

Say you have someone who is growing up a bit odd, and is liable to be damaged by viewing violent porn. Will this stop him seeing it? I don't think it will. Deprived kids very often end up watching, say TV and films that are marked as unsuitable for their agegroup, because they don't have the parental protection they need.

I suspect if this was implemented, in 20 years a survey will find that kids who grow up to have violent sex problems are more likely to come from homes with unregulated internet, but that won't be cause, it will be correlation - those are the homes that weren't monitoring their kids access anyway, that were leaving adult DVDs around the living room, smoking round the kids, etc etc.

[purplecat]

As a parent, and having been through various rounds of trying to filter my daughter's access to online content, we've ultimately found the most effective filter is discussing appropriate and inappropriate content with her and she has, in fact, become a great deal more prudish than we are about what she considers acceptable. Her school has also run through a lot of dos and don'ts about internet usage which, I assume, is part of some kind of national drive and again means she is careful about things like accepting friend requests on the various age appropriate social networking sites she uses (Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters).

Obviously I'd be happier if her chances of running across simulated Mario rape on YouTube were non-existent but I have rapidly come round to the view, supported by my in-laws who have older children, that the problems are pretty minimal if you are open and honest with your children (without thrusting information upon them they aren't old enough to deal with), and make it clear what you expect of their online behaviour. On the whole I'd prefer it if this was something parents and schools were expected to handle and was a part generally of teaching children to behave responsibly online, rather than something imposed nationally at a network level.

We could after all, ban cars from urban environments which would probably save at least 100 children's lives per year, but we don't. Instead we teach our children to cross the road safely.