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Researchers Find That Filters Don't Prevent Porn (techcrunch.com)
According to a new paper from Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski, internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn. Basically, the filters are expensive and they don't work. "Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily 'underblock' due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations -- filtering can lead to 'overblocking', where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information." TechCrunch reports: The researchers "found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content." The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content" and even then a filter "showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects." The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed, subjects still saw approximately the same amount of porn.
Censorship won't work. The internet protects young people from prudes who like to censor.
Tell kids that everything they see on their screen, you can also see on yours. (That is, of course, until they wise up).
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Just the other day on Slashdot, people were telling me how absolutely nobody could ever want a kid-safe internet service, because you can just install filtering software on all of your devices.
I'm curious to see what they think of this study.
(Also curious if they were never 12 or 13 years old and showing their parents how to use technology.)
just about every kid could have told them filters don't work
Should have added this link to connectsafely.org too.
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So your hosts file has filtered out every single porn site on the net?
That's one hell of a good reason not to use it.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
...for the kids to install a TOR plugin into the entertainment system, leaving the adults to be the ones who can't figure out the blocking system.
"The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools"
Oddly specific, but why the large range? And why so few households, presumably out of an entire country?
Not speaking about younger children but with young teens my experience is that once blocked from something they want to see, they will find other ways to get to it and diligently figure out how to hide that fact from you. Don't bet on figuring it out.
I have had better luck explaining what it is, why they shouldn't watch it and then telling them that I am going to give them the responsibility to not purposely view it. I also open the door to ask questions they have about it without cracking jokes or making fun of anyone (a trusting converstion). The point being they ask questions and not feel embarrassed doing it.They will hide things regardless and they will prefer asking friends and other people but that sense responsibility seems much more effective than being oppressive about it. When being oppressive, you better believe they will find somewhere else or some other method to find what they want to see/do. They will also be less open to you about what they are actually doing as well.
From what I have seen, the more restrictive you are about something, the more they do it once you have no control over them. They are growing people, they will be curious and they may try once the hormones start kicking in, but by then you probably have more important things to worry about than porn.
Without being signed in at google.com all you have to do is search bare breast and viola', you have lovely bare breast of all sizes and colors. How exactly are you going to prevent them from seeing this content again?
I suggest lots of education and embarrassing conversations with your child. Explaining to them that porn is fantasy and that it is not how relationships work. Explain what exactly sex is and don't dance around the subject. The penis goes inside the vagina. Pulling out isn't good enough because precum can get you preggers. If you can't have that conversation with your child, that's your failure as an adult.
If you think not telling them this will some how get them to not think or wonder about it, you are a delusional parent. Explain to them that having a kid means your life is now OVER!!!! Seriously, over. No going out with friends, no closing down the bars. No picking up guys/girls. No weekends away with all your friends at Las Vegas. You get to watch your kid. This is triple true with a baby.
Of course, if your teen gets preggers, that's almost entirely your failure as a parent as well. Ironically, or maybe not, many teens that have kids end up pawning the kid off onto the parent(s) anyway because they aren't mature enough to have the kid in the first place. It's pretty sad. Parent does such a bad job raising one kid, they end up getting to raise another and the cycle repeats.
For example. don't most human beings have a filter that enables them to choose whether or not to look at porn? Obviously there can be neurologically atypical patterns that might be the exception to this, but generally speaking, this is going to be true for most people.
The brain follows the laws of physics, so there is nothing physically impossible about being able to detect whether or not something is porn.
This ultimately only means that we don't currently have the technology to achieve it, not that it is literally and physically impossible to do.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Whenever I watch tvision, at the start of every show, there's a big obvious black square in the corner, with an audience rating provided by the content authors. It's there for all of the expected reasons -- viewer discretion is advised.
Is it so difficult to regulate that web-sites do the same? A simple HTTP header X-AudienceRating would do just fine. Don't do it, or lie with it, and police show up at your door. Welcome to teeth.
Overblocking is only ever a concern because you're expected to be able to access community content. But community content is never from outside of your country. So it's easy to have your filter block anything outside your country that doesn't have the header, if you desire.
Sounds like we've solved all of this countless times before. It's been called Parental Lock everywhere else.
So, what's the problem? Oh yeah, no one likes mapping existing laws to the internet, but everyone wants to call the internet here to stay. Gas has taxes to support roads. When cars are mostly electric, they'll be taxed too, because they still need roads. We've always regulated media outlets. Web-sites are no different.
X-AudienceRating - F, G, PG, AA, R, X, XXX
Why is this difficult?
You mentioned the most simple possible approaches, a whitelist, or a blacklist. A comprehensive blacklist is actually too large to install client-side, but there are much more advanced approaches available.
You can of course go to Google and get a list of sites covering any topic, such as perhaps "compare ease of learning different server-side programming languages", even though Google has not made such a list. You know there are far more advanced methods for categorizing content than using a pre-generated list, but you seem to have forgotten that for a moment.
You can use both pre-generated data and dynamic algorithms in concert. You can analyze keywords on the fly, of course, and that includes keywords in other sites that link to the site in question, ala:
https://www.google.com/search?...
If PBS.org links to a site, it's probably safe. If pornhub links to a site, that's a red flag. If the site consists primarily of image galleries or video galleries, that's worth a couple points. Have a CCBill signup page or Strongbox login page? Probably porn.
If you use your imagination for two or three minutes you can probably think of ways such a service could use several terabytes of data and a cluster of very fast web proxies. AI even. I don't think it'll take you long to think of how three racks of equipment in a datacenter could do this more effectively than a 20MB app installed on a tablet can do it.
i've been behind enough corporate firewalls to see that a blocked site is blocked. How would a smart kid circumvent a strong setup?
So education is better than non-education???
Those ratings are voluntary, not legally mandated. Web sites can use the exact same MTA rating system and some do. More use a different rating system. A lot of porn sites use the meta tag, but very few non-porn sites do, so that reduces the usefulness.
Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to explain WHY the system is voluntary and trying to pass a law about it doesn't work - at all. Perhaps someone else will be kind enough to explain that.
There *is* a US law that in effect says that all porn sites must have "2257" at the bottom of the front page, or the next page if the site uses a splash page. That's a pretty effective item to filter on. The Girls Gone Wild guy, Joe Francis, went to jail for not complying with 2257. The law is a bit more than just having that number on the web page, but the practical effect is that porn sites all put a "2257 disclosure" link at the bottom of the page.
John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh well, there it is. - Dr. Ian Malcolm
I had no trouble accessing porn as an adolescent back in the 80s without the internet so not sure why now would be any different.
It's OK if they see a dozen bloody murders each hour. OK to commit murders while gaming. But doG forbid they should see lovemaking!
The murdering is OK with most governments because they know it's usually for some patriotic cause, and these mindless masses who love simulated killing will be easy to recruit into warriors for the rich. Cannon fodder.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Put the family computer in the living room. No pocket internet connected devices (it's not yet considered child abuse to not get them cell phones).
No point making it easy, or too soon. Let them get a bit older and get some maturity.
Explain what's out there, at age appropriate levels.
Wait a minute, I thought the purpose of porn filters was to provide a bit of the hacking ethos and a little information security experience.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
1. Keep all internet usage for 12 to 24 months.
2. Create a list of sites a nations internet users are never allowed to use.
3. Go back over list of sites users looked at for any usage of the sites that are not allowed.
4. Look for repeated and long term use of sites that are not allowed.
5. Send plainclothes police to have a shutdown with people who use the sites most often and for a long time.
6. Detect changes in usage patterns.
7. People who don't stop using the internet in that way get more police interviews. People connected to them interviewed about their lifestyle.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That's awesome, I had no idea about 2257. I'll add that to the list, like the beeping traffic lights, that I wish people would be taught.
No filtering won't prevent a determined individual from accessing porn. However, it goes a long way from preventing accidental exposure, which as someone that doesn't want to see porn and as a parent wants keep my children from running across in casual browsing.
That said the only sure porn filter is a personal determination to avoid it. This is only achieved through learning and teaching correct principles and allowing the individual to implement those principles.
Those correct principles are: Viewing porn makes your personal life miserable and ruins your ability to have meaningful and deep relationships (both sexual and non-sexual) with people of the opposite sex.
Filters don't porn people. People porn people.
As someone who distributes porn on the Internet, I've always been frustrated by the lack of a standardized rating mechanism, so that it will only be displayed when people actually want to see it, and content won't be accidentally cached by search engines. Few people believe that the ancient "rating" meta tag means anything to search engines, though I do use that just in case.
It would be nice to work on that first before crying about porn being too easily accessible.