Internet filtering for children (or other reasons) that would actually make sense

[jack]

I was recently debating in another journal about new suggestions for internet filtering, ostensibly to prevent children seeing child-inappropriate sites. This is normally met with -- imho justified -- cries of doom. However, it does seem likely that there would be ways to approach it which would actually do some good -- if you, as a reasonably technical aware person, were proposing something, what would it be?

Suggestions:

* Not support political censorship
* If it requires a large investment of manpower (eg. great firewall) be upfront about where that comes from
* Should fulfil stated purpose of allowing concerned non-technical parents to protect their children from inappropriate content to at least some extent
* Should not be a massive expensive unworkable pointless joke
* Should be clear if it will work a country at a time (probably not) or be a small but incremental improvement over large classes of website.

Whatever the government is thinking about is almost certainly unworkable. But if there were something NOT ridiculous which could be suggested instead, that would actually be better than just "it doesn't work", or at least make clear to people who DO want a solution that it may be expensive.

It might even have positive side effects if (eg) pure spam domain names were caught in the crossfire.

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yes there will be a false positive rate with such a system, and if you're tuning it to block a lot of porn then it'll probably block a lot of non-porn as well.

I would expect the proposed system (which will probably never happen, but anyway...) would allow the customer to entirely opt out if they wanted to (like the mobile broadband system) and might even allow you to override on a site by site basis (e.g. "Enter your pin to unlock hotsexygirls.com for 1 hour").

[naath]

Well, that depends how it works.

If it is meant to be robust against teenagers who are more tech-savvy than their parents (because if the parents were more tech-savvy they would have solved the problem of blocking sites they don't like from their teen's computers already!) then you can't allow the user to disable it from their computer. I imagine the process for turning it off would probably be quite irritating to manage (or it would be functionally useless).

If you are blocking porn because the user has decided themselves that they don't want to see random porn all over the place then you obviously include a "no no I really want to see this one" button. But if you don't want the user to have that power it's harder.

I admit I worry mostly about what non-porn things will end up classified as "not suitable for children". I'm not going to cry over kids not being able to see porn! But kids not being able to access information about sexuality and anatomy would be depressing.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think any such system would be primarily targeting young children inadvertently coming across porn online. The figure quoted in the commons was that 50% of children have seen pornography by the age of 11, and the example given was that the google search "American girls" is both the name of a series of kids dolls and the name of a porn site that appears on the first page of a google moderate safe search search.

I don't think such a system would be very effective at stopping truly determined late teenagers who are technically proficient (although I think it could make things much harder which probably is a good thing).

I agree it would be fairly pointless for preventing access for adults themselves. I suspect a better implementation might have a "The site is blocked due to being XYZ type of site. To unblock for your internet connection permanently or for X minutes enter your PIN here".

I think there would be some miscategorisation, that's inevitable, but this could be limited. Sites could optionally self certify and such self certification would take precedence over the algorithms categorisation. So a sex ed site could self certify as being non pornographic and so access would be allowed. Of course this is open to abuse, but it sounds like a good compromise to me.