In UK, Search Engines Urged To Block More Online Porn Sites 186
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.
Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.
porn or violence (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
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:porn or violence (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
confused meddler (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ? (Score:5, Insightful)