The Open Rights Group has launched a satirical government website called The Department of Dirty that highlights the problems related to default-on web filtering.
In the wake of government pressure, major UK communications providers -- the internet service providers and mobile operators -- agreed to switch on default adult content filters. This means that anyone wanting to view adult content has to actively inform their supplier. It's being done, nominally, to protect children from corrupting influences, but the filters have been shown to be incredibly ineffective, letting hardcore material slip thorough the net while preventing access to sex education, addiction information and women's abuse charity sites.
The Department of Dirty website showcases this new government department policing citizens' browsing habits, forcing individuals to call up a number if they want to view a recipe for "spotted dick" and explain why they want to view such "dirty" content. The site says: "It's only natural that people worry about their kids, isn't it?
The problem is that educating them about tricky things like relationships, pornography and hate speech costs a lot of money.
Not only that, the Daily Mail don't like it and there's an election due next year. So we're all better off if we pretend we're sorting out social problems by banning the internet. Job done."
Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock told Wired.co.uk that they have launched the campaign because the default filtering system is "flawed and not a one-click to safety as a David Cameron would have us believe". "We want people to know it's OK to not sign up to this stuff
[the filters]."
Filters are an easy solution for a complicated problem. The Open Rights Group acknowledges that no-one wants their children seeing hardcore pornography, but argues that it's "deeply irresponsible" to think that filters will protect them. Instead, parents should be talking to their children about their internet use. "Talking about porn, extremism or self-harming sites might not come naturally to most of us. But we have a responsibility to equip our children with the skills they need to navigate their way in the digital world -- just as we do in the non-digital world. Filters alone don't do that," explains the organisation on the Department of Dirty site.
Killock urges people to check their own mobile phone settings and then call their operator to make sure that filtering is switched off. "We are also pushing for mobile providers to be explicit about the fact that people have a choice about filtering when they sign up to contracts and make it easier to enable and disable it in their user settings," he says.
The campaign builds on the Open Rights Group's Blocked project, which revealed that one in five websites are getting caught up in the web filters designed to protect young people. Blocked has tested more than 200,000 sites and lets you submit your own links to see whether filters are being too heavy handed. "We are trying to work out how much overblocking is going on and how poorly the filters are implemented," Killock explains, admitting that the error rate is not necessarily huge, with perhaps one site in 1,000 wrongly identified. "But multiply that by five or six different providers (because they all make different mistakes) and combine that with a complete lack of transparency," he says, pointing out that the sites that tend to be mistakenly blocked are those that young people most urgently need to access, such as sites about sexuality and drug issues.
The slow summer months are often used by politicians to push for more internet censorship and blame the web for every ill often as a prelude to further legislative action. July and August can be used to more easily get the headlines in order to set a political agenda. In the previous two years we've seen heavy discussion about adult filters and online bullying, for example.
The news coincides with an Ofcom report that shows that the vast majority of new broadband customers in the UK are opting out of these "child friendly" filters when prompted to install them by service providers.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
