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

Of course it doesn't hand the list out

[Fluffeh]

Would you want work done by a bunch of students with a single day of training to be up for review?

Will the porn tourism to Sweden return?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until the early 1980s, there was a lot of pornography tourism (not really sex tourism, they only came for the "dirty" magazines and films, getting hookers or hook up with someone for casual sex have always been easier in UK then in Sweden, not even weighting in the language barriers, which was considerable for English speaking tourists in Sweden during the 1960s) from United Kingdom to Sweden. British men coming to Sweden only to buy a suitcase full of porn. There was even some Swedish cinemas, catering pornographic films chiefly to British porn tourists. When the pornography tourism from UK diminished, most of the then existing sex shops and cinemas in Stockholm and Gothenburg was closed down.

Until the early 70s, there was also lot of British women who visited Sweden to buy sex toys, and even condoms and lubricants. Nowadays only a small trickle of women from Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and similar Catholic countries do that.

The related sex tourism to Denmark (where prostitution is legal, but with some restrictions) from UK have never diminished, but in this tourism the UK men is not alone, there are plenty of sex tourists from other countries visiting Denmark too, ironically, even some Swedish sex tourists (Sweden have some of Europes hardest laws against prostitution, and the Swedish police uphold them meticulously).