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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).
AC comments get piped to
just about every kid could have told them filters don't work
Should have added this link to connectsafely.org too.
AC comments get piped to
Agreed. As a teenager my dad sat me down and basically admitted he could do nothing to stop me from doing whatever I wanted. He said, "So don't disappoint me and know that I'm here to help if you need."
In another discussion, he agreed that if I was ever at a party and too drunk to drive home I could call him and he'd pick me up, no questions asked. His reasoning was that if I'm was responsible enough to call for a ride then I was responsible enough to drink. Never took him up on it but it meant a lot to me that he was putting the responsibility on me.
More people in this world need a dad like mine.
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.
I tried that, but none of the pictures showed a string instrument.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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...
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.