In UK, Search Engines Urged To Block More Online Porn Sites

An anonymous reader writes "Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said. John Carr said increasing the number of sites automatically blocked by search engines would make it more difficult for paedophiles to get images of abuse. It comes after Mark Bridger was found guilty of the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones in Powys." It sounds like a continuation of the blocked-by-default porn white-listing plan that's been going around in the UK for a few years now.

Comments

Think of the children blah blah

[sl4shd0rk]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[alendit]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?

How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.

But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[kasperd]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

Yes, but there should be tools helping the parents in doing so.

The suggestion in the summary is mixing up two completely unrelated issues. Those issues must be addressed separately, otherwise we are going to end up with the wrong solution.

There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision. But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.

The other issue, which is completely unrelated, and should be treated as such, is the issue of child pornography. Many people are acting as if the main problem to be solved is that of people looking at such pictures. And as long as we can prevent anybody from looking at those pictures, then the problem has been solved. That is not true. All which has been achieved by that is hiding the real problem. The real problem is, that what is depicted took place in the first place. That pictures were taken of it and that somebody saw them did not make the abuse itself any worse for the kid, but in some cases it does help reveal that the abuse is taking place, which can help stopping it.

Current laws may actually do more to destroy evidence of crimes rather than stopping the crimes themselves. How would things change if possession and distribution of child pornography was legalized, but manufacturing and trading it remained illegal? Instead of interest organizations building up censorship, which is ultimately going to hurt more, when it is used for other purposes, those interest organizations could collect child pornography and perform data mining on it, and as soon as they have identified individuals in the images, they can hand that over to authorities. I believe that would do more to stop abuse of children, than the current laws.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[MysteriousPreacher]

How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?

How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.

But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!

The child can learn about sex on their wedding night. Prior to that no-one really has much of an interest anyway and certainly won't be finding ways to slake that curiosity.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[arkhan_jg]

It's nothing to do with kids getting age-appropriate material (this time). Their contention is that adult pedophiles first see pictures of children being abused (or anime versions, which are no different according to them) which then encourages them to go out, abduct, rape and murder children.

The obvious solution for the censor brigade is the same setup that mobile phone networks have largely switched to - heavy filtering by default (in this particular example, they want maximum google safe search as default on for everyone) so adult men can't find pictures or anime of naked children, and thus, will never go on to rape and murder real children. Tada! In order to see any sites that are otherwise filtered - such as legal porn, medical sites, art sites, any site to do with the town of scunthorpe - you have to register yourself as a dirty porn watching perv, which list presumably the police will be watching closely in case you start desiring to go on a child abduction and murdering rampage, and will explicitly discourage people from doing, thus keeping their minds clear of unpure thoughts in good Christian fashion.

That it achieves one of their other goals, the appearance of a kiddy-friendly internet with no adult-only activity ever, is just a happy co-incidence.

In a separate but parallel move, the Home Secretary is trying to revive the Snooper's charter - i.e. ISPs, webhosts, service providers such as google and facebook would have to keep extensive logs of what emails and websites UK users visit, which the police and security services can troll through at their leisure, looking for Islamic terrorists planning on chopping down passersby in the street with machetes. And probably now porn-viewing adults, in case they turn out to be child murdering pedo's.

It is the usual 'ban this filth, won't someone think of the children' attempts to whitelist the internet, but this time it's to protect the children from the men who murder them because they saw porn on the internet and decided to get the real thing. That child porn is ALREADY blacklisted by the list run by the IWF, and subscribed to by most ISPs, and he was getting stuff that wasn't on the blacklist, and thus filtering wasn't actually even doing the job they wanted it to when running as intended is being conveniently ignored.

That they and the home secretary don't have a damn clue about how the tech, ISPs or the internet work is a given. They see it as one giant branch of WH Smiths, and it's just like banning the sale of dirty magazines, and will obviously solve the problem once and for all, and anyone that tries to point out the flaws is in league with the terrorists and the pedo child murderers, and heaven forbid anyone express concerns about the Big Brother or Free Speech aspects.

porn or violence

[Ubi_NL]

it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.

I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.

Re:porn or violence

[rduke15]

I agree. And I also noticed that children tend to go sites for children because that is where they find what they want.
The "pornography" they might stumble upon accidentally is soft, and they don't even notice it because it's not intersting
Once they start finding pornography interesting, you cannot prevent them from finding it, and why would you anyway.
As teenagers, before the Internet, we had some pornographic magazines which someone would have found and which we would look at in a far away corner of the school yard. It hasn't traumatized me.

In short, my children who are now almost adult always had access to the Internet, and I have never noticed a problem with pornography.

Play spot the fallacy/error

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure exactly what it is Carr wants blocked? He seems to be calling for all sexual imagery to be blocked, and to justify this he cites behaviour related to pretty fucking horrendous child porn. It's like banning all metals because sodium reacts pretty explosively on contact with water.

Mr Carr said there was "no question" that some men who look at child sex abuse images go on to carry out abuse.

Earlier, speaking to BBC Radio 5 live he said: "There is enough evidence to suggest that if we can put more barriers towards guys getting to child abuse images, fewer of them will do it and more children will be safe."

He said between 15 and 50 per cent of men who previously had no involvement with child abuse images would go on to physically harm children once they accessed them.

This rate seems very high. I'm assuming he's referring to the kinds of images that most people wouldn't really want to be seeing, in which case these are deviants who have self-selected themselves. The impression he's giving is that up to 50% of normal otherwise sexually healthy people will driven quite mad by porn.
To put it another way, 40% of people who enjoy lettuce in some part of their diet are obese, therefore we should restrict lettuce if we wish to reduce obesity.

His comment on increasing barriers to porn being an effective way to reduce child abuse is pretty fucking telling. The same logic can be used to ban or restrict pretty much anything. Let's say that 10% of people who steal cars will use them in bank robberies, therefore introducing a levy on car purchases will decrease purchases, reducing car availability, thus decreasing bank robberies. Whether its the journalist or him, I don't know, but the tack keeps shifting. I agree that restricting access to images of child abuse is sensible, but is that all he wants? Earlier he seems to be going after legal porn sites as well. I get the impression he's happy to drive a bulldozer through a house in order to crack a walnut.

It has been suggested that some internet companies are reluctant to change their search settings as it would drive users to sites unwilling to change their policy and put them at a competitive disadvantage.

And the same would be true if Carr was asking Google to censor all search results depicting black people. They'd have no good reason to do so, and it would indeed gimp their service and drive customers away.

But he said one of the "key routes" paedophiles used to find content was through adverts containing "code words" that are placed on legal hardcore pornography sites.

So paedos have their secret code words anyway for locating their child porn - what's the fucking point in using Google then? Also, what he's getting at here is that legal porn sites are providing super secret access to child porn, so the solution is to remove all porn sites (legal or not) from search results? Website operators found complicit in the distribution of illegal images should be dealt with by the law - not everyone blocked because Carr claims there are some bad apples. Certainly people caught browsing such sites should be hearing from Plod.

Ridiculous

[X10]

Both John Carr and I have been involved in the foundation of Inhope.org. But ever since hotlines and online child protection came into fashion, there's been differences in policies in various countries in Europe. In the Netherlands, policy makers, service providers and volunteers have always had their focus on preventing and fighting (pictures of) online child abuse (aka "child pornography"). In the UK, the focus has been on protecting childrens poor souls from seeing things that policy makers think children should not see. Hence, they block the obvious porn sites, leaving only the more hidden and nasty sites for children to visit. Even the EU in the early 90's quickly switched from preventing online child abuse to blocking porn. There was plenty of subsidy from the EU to local hotlines (of which Meldpunt was the first and the Internet Watch Foundation second), but as the focus shifted, Meldpunt was party left out from the subsidies, because it kept its focus where it should be: preventing and fighting child sexual abuse.

Sex is part of life. Educating children about sex makes them better prepared for life as an adult. You can easily see that by comparing stats for porn intolerance and teen pregnancies. Holland has a very low teen pregnancy number. And if parents don't want their kids to see online sex, why can't we just leave that to parents?

Governments should spend tons of money catching the guys who sexually abuse children. They should not interfere with sexual education, let alone censor the internet.

confused meddler

[Cederic]

His statements seem to be very confused. He wants Google and others to do more to block material depicting child abuse. Well that's already blocked in the UK, and it's done at the ISP level with no need for Google to be involved.

He wants Google to use 'safe search' as their default search setting. I thought they already did?

He seems to think people will have to register to be able to search for porn. Register where? Search how? And register for what? This is where I'm utterly confused by what he's assuming, what he's proposing and how he thinks it will work.

The only certainty is that it wont.

Mark Bridger viewed non-pornographic images of April Jones from Facebook. So does Carr want Facebook banned? Does he want images of five year olds banned from Facebook? Does he want it to be impossible to search for images on Facebook?

Mark Bridger had a collection of images of child abuse. Those images are already illegal. Access to them is blocked when possible already within the UK. There's not a whole lot Google can do about that, not least because anybody finding any material via Google can already notify the Internet Watch Foundation and let them know about it.

The good news is that in another ten years or so the politicians will start to be replaced by people that grew up with the Internet, that understand it better and that will at least have a grasp of the pragmatic realities involved.

Re:Is England turning Islamic ?

[xelah]

This seems to be being pushed by rather conservative types, not by the UK population or government coalition as a whole. Bear in mind that the Conservative party here is feeling under pressure from the even more conservative anti-EU UKIP, and have a lot of unhappy backbenchers currently busy being revolting over gay marriage. Also bear in mind that there's quite a big generational attitude difference to things like this, with younger people being a lot more liberal but not well represented politically. There's been a lot of conflation of child abuse, child porn and adult porn in debate and reporting, which only makes me think even more that this is as much about older generations dislike of younger generations sexual attitudes as it is about child porn or online 'safety'.