Forcing UK internet users to opt-in for access to online porn wouldn’t be very effective and would do nothing to help parents educate their children on the dangers of the internet, a Google spokeswoman said this week.
The UK government has been wrestling with the question of adult content on the internet; specifically how to protect innocent children from the heaps of filth available online.
It is currently consultation with ISPs is the suggestion that internet smut filters be imposed across the board, and given a default setting of ‘no smut’, effectively turning off the free-flowing porn-tap that many have come to know and love as the majority of the internet.
This would also mean that web users with a hankering for this type of underpants-centric content would have to request that their ISP remove the filter.
Speaking at a Google Big Tent event in England this week, Sarah Hunter, Google’s head of public police said that such a block was unlikely to be effective, and warned that it risked ‘deskilling’ parents rather than educating them.
“We believe that children shouldn’t be seeing pornography online,” she said, reassuringly. “We disagree on the mechanisms. It’s not that easy.
“There is a problem about the extent to which we deskill parents by giving them simple solutions,” she added. “We should be making more effort than we’ve done in the past to make sure parents really do know the risks children face online.”
Andrew Heaney, director of strategy at Talk Talk, currently the only ISP to offer UK customers this kind of filter, agreed that implementing blocks by default was a ‘slippery slope’. He also admitted that such filters were not a silver bullet, and can be navigated around by ‘a clever teenager’ fairly easily.
The debate raises a number of censorship questions. A study released by the Open Rights Group earlier this month highlighted the tricky nature of the issue, revealing that opt-in ‘adult content’ filters on some mobile networks, which require the user to prove their age before access to grumble-material is granted, were mistakenly blocking some perfectly innocent sites.
To get the end-user view on this issue, we contacted an incessant adult content viewer and father of three David Hardy (not his real name), who gave his wholehearted backing to Google’s viewpoint.
“It’s my responsibility to protect my children,” he said. “And while I appreciate the government’s effort to help, I find the notion of some kind of imposed censorship barrier between my family and the outside world quite condescending.
“Also, I would absolutely resent having to ring up some call centre in India to ask them to make sex videos come on my laptop,” he added. “What a passion killer.”
