British Pornographers Called to Improve ISP Filters

[Harry-Potter]

One of the UK industry groups has started a new website meant to educate parents about content filters, because it turned out that the government-imposed filters fail to do their job. Pornography filters introduced by British ISPs at the government’s behest seem to be blocking innocent websites while failing to block adult ones.

 

 

Adult industry has expressed concern that the use of the recently imposed filtering could lead to misblocking and is currently calling the government to pay attention to this problem. They have launched their own website, xxxaware.co.uk, which is meant to tell parents about the range of tools available to block access to unwanted websites and enable parental instruments on various devices ranging from computers to smartphones, tablets, games consoles, TVs and apps.

The group of companies that started the site explained that it will give parents the choice, control and confidence to decide what is right for their kids. The launch is supported by Portland TV (the adult content channel), Studio 66 TV, Paul Raymond Publications, WMIT and a couple of firms carrying out age verification – Veridu and Intelligent Identity.

However, since the site was launched, the group has had no contact from policymakers or anybody in government. This is why they have some concerns about “overblocking” - preventing access to websites that kids might need to access, like those about sex education. They are also afraid of “underblocking”, where websites with inappropriate content are accessible. All this has led to intense debate about the benefits and drawbacks of filtering and whether adults should be able to choose for themselves what websites to block. For example, last month Sky’s parental control filters mistakenly blocked a code plugin called jQuery, needed for the operation of many top sites. As a result, many sites lost much of their functionality.

The industry points out that imposing filtering on a household’s Internet feed may cut adults off from legitimate porn while failing to block it from kids. The largest British ISPs, including Sky, BT and TalkTalk, have explained that their new customers will have to make a choice between having filters enabled or not.

However, the group behind xxxaware believes that their site will tell parents about instruments available to provide parental controls on a device-by-device basis, as opposed to the blunt method of wholesale ISP filtering. As an industry-wide initiative, they want to encourage the uptake of parental controls so that adult users could continue to access the material they need, without risk to kids or government intervention.