Britain's Broadband Censors: a Bunch of Students

nk497 writes "British ISPs have been told by the government to offer their customers parental control systems to block content like gambling sites and pornography, but the McAfee system used by BT and Sky leaves the tough censoring decisions to a small group of barely-trained students. While much of the categorization work is done using an automated system, decisions on whether porn is 'hardcore' or merely 'erotica,' or whether a page contains hate speech, is left to a team of five to ten people with a day of training — and the job is apparently popular with students. McAfee doesn't publish the list of sites it hands to ISPs to block, making it difficult to see if your own site has been misclassified."

Comments

url lookups

[modestgeek]

I could care less who is doing the categorization. There are going to be mistakes. The important thing is being able to challenge the rating. Most of these content filtering products have URL category lookup and you can report sites that need further review.

McAfee http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url
BlueCoat http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp

The rest are easily found via google or from their respective support sites.