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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."
Would you want work done by a bunch of students with a single day of training to be up for review?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Shifting through and categorizing thousands of pages a day requires cheap untrained workforce.
It is my duty to point out that "Taliban" is Persian for "Students".
Well, at least no one saw that one coming. No one could ever have predicted that a government mandate issued to private company would wind up being sourced to the cheapest possible labor.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Does it matter if it's a group of students or a group of politicians? or a group of little old ladies? or a group of aliens from Betelgeuse?
In all seriousness, it doesn't matter *who* does the censoring, they'll always get it wrong. Only the end viewer requesting the page can decide if something is "hardcore" or merely "erotica". Nobody can decide what standards are acceptable to anyone else.
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.
I understand we want to protect the pure eyes of the public from disgusting content. Well, actually I don't, if nobody gets harmed in the making of the images, to each one is fantasy. Furthermore, it is not like bestiality is around every click, and seeing a nipple is not going to traumatize anybody, we all have two, don't we ? For the sake of the argument, say we buy the idea that internet 'needs' to be filtered to protect the public from seeing "things". Doesn't it defeats the purpose, when little Johny is protected from porn from 1 to 18, then gets to watch objectively offensive and disgusting porn, the kind of things that makes you despair about humanity, but for 20 hours a week, as a student job to pay tuition ? Am I the only one to think that the work-watchers are going to increase by a wide margin the exposure to insanely offensive material, that otherwise nobody encounters without actually looking for it ?
If they're using a feather, its erotica. If they're using a chicken, its porn.
Have gnu, will travel.
Exactly. I forget who said it, and I don't remember the exact wording, but I once read a very wise quote: "Evaluate any government proposal based not on the supposed benefit that will be imparted if administered properly, but by the harm inflicted if administered improperly."
And besides that, we're talking about a system where one group of people are making decisions about "appropriateness" for a huge mass of people. The notion of what is "adult" or "inappropriate" content varies from individual to individual, as does the notion of "mental preparedness". As with any system of censorship or ratings, those who disagree are left by the wayside (see: "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" for an excellent example using the MPAA).