T-Mobile's Optional Censorship Falls Down

An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile USA offers a 'feature' to restrict access to certain kinds of content. This is called Web Guard. Supposedly Web Guard is supposed to inhibit access to content that falls under certain categories. The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), developed a tool to detect what sites were being censored. Amongst them were political news sites, foreign sports news sites and other sites that should not have been censored." It's quite an eclectic bunch of sites that are blocked, but then censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.

I ran into that

[c1t1z3nk41n3]

When I switched my T-Mobile Sim from a contract to a prepaid sim it automatically enabled this 'feature'. I didn't notice until it blocked access to a 2nd Amendment forum. The process for getting it disabled was fairly annoying as well. They wanted all kinds of odd information from me to verify my age. I suppose they were doing a public records lookup. The guy on the phone said it's because children can buy a prepay sim. If AT&T wasn't worse I'd probably have just cancelled service with them.

Re:I ran into that

[X.25]

They copied that phony practice from Google: if you want to get uncensored results you have to "log in" which means give up your privacy/anonymity.

I am not quite sure why you'd spew nonsense like that.

Open private tab/window, to go Google, search for "blowjob", click "Images", set "SafeSearch" to "Off" - and you're done.

No need to log in.