Researchers Find That Filters Don't Prevent Porn (techcrunch.com) 126
According to a new paper from Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski, internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn. Basically, the filters are expensive and they don't work. "Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily 'underblock' due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations -- filtering can lead to 'overblocking', where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information." TechCrunch reports: The researchers "found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content." The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content" and even then a filter "showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects." The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed, subjects still saw approximately the same amount of porn.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Censorship won't work. The internet protects young people from prudes who like to censor.
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I do want to censor. I am a censor. I want to keep my 10 year old children from seeing awful things they can't unsee.
What is the best way to achieve this?
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Install an adblocker.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Monitor.
Then trust.
Kids will always find ways to access what they want to see. Best to teach/explain/trust than to make them feel suppressed or constantly watched.
connectsafely.org (Score:3)
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By "trust" you mean "pretend".
About 5 seconds after you have that talk with them, they're going to go and do the exact thing you asked them not to do.
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I've always taken this to mean that when you're discussing evil (I'm not going to say pornography is evil, but it's probably not wise to show a six year old a video of an orgy so I'
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Don't tell them not to do it, Explain means explain there are things they may not like if they find them and TEACH them internet literacy... if you can't do the latter hire someone who can and sit with them while they do so...
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This, on the web site that I was first maliciously redirected to tub girl. I use filters and blocks for my family, AND have the conversations and the monitoring and the trusting, thank you very much.
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Explain.
Monitor.
Then trust.
Kids will always find ways to access what they want to see. Best to teach/explain/trust than to make them feel suppressed or constantly watched.
Whoa, whoa, whoa... Back this thing up here... It sounds like you're talking about actual parenting, creating an environment where if your child sees something that they're confused about or disturbed by, they can talk to their parent.
No, in this case the breeder simply wants a fail-proof electronic nanny so they don't have to do anything to raise their crotchspawns.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Blindfolds.
Seriously, the internet is the least of your worries. News on the TV from wartorn countries, gory action movies, computer games at any level above Mario, the list is endless.
The world is a raw and unforgiving place. Sheltering your kids until they're 18 is only going to make the shock that much worse.
I'm not saying to sit down and watch a porn marathon with them, but consider instilling a healthy understanding in them of what sex is (pleasurable) and isn't (magical).
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When I was a kid, well, I grew up in a small town that had been an industrial center for brick-making, even when I was young. There were traces of it everywhere, and in a small woods near my house there were a bunch of old tile pipes about a couple feet in diameter and four or five feet long stacked up nicely in a row, about three pipes high. It was there that someone stored his rather extensive porn collection. Did I mention this was on my paper route?
So, my friends and I would go there and look and rea
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Your post belies your username. :P
I made that name in 1999 if I remember correctly. I lived in a trailer from 1990 to 1998. I wired a 10BT network in it with a tiny 5 port hub. Living the redneck dream.
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A proper semantic device — either a human or an artificial intelligence... And even that will not be reliable — for example, humans have struggled to define "porn" (as opposite to "erotic art") for decades, if not millennia.
The best is, probably, to just warn your kids so they are ready — and not let them at the Internet until you are reasonably comfortable.
The joke goes like this: "Damn, the Internet connection is so slow today — either my son is
Re: Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't. It was super easy to get porn before the internet. If the internet was around when I was a kid there would have been nothing my parents could have done to prevent me getting access to porn.
Best thing to do is explain to your kids what's out there so that they're not that curious about it. You don't have to get into heavy details, just as much as they can understand. If they don't learn it from you it'll be from friends at school or TV and both are probably worse then what you'll tell them.
It is up to you to explain how easy it is today to find yourself on some of those shady sites. Playing "Free" games or watching "free" movies on shady sites. Even watching an innocent YouTube videos can end up in crazy land that shocks us adults.
Honestly, that's all I think we as parents can do. I pull this from my experience not with my own parents but with my friends mother who was extremely blunt and was willing to explain to me anything I wanted to know. My parents, as much as I love them, were uncomfortable talking about things like that.
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You can't. It was super easy to get porn before the internet. If the internet was around when I was a kid there would have been nothing my parents could have done to prevent me getting access to porn.
I grew up (before the internet) without seeing any porn.
We didn't have a TV in my family. Eventually we got a radio but it was only used in rare circumstances to listen to classical music or the news from NPR. And if we started up the car for a family trip and the radio turned on - implying that my father had been listening to the car radio - then the radio would be quickly turned off and there would be a painful silence - as if my father had been caught doing something unspeakably obscene - a great betray
Re: (Score:1)
If your kids can't figure out how to silently work around any censorship/nanny block you put in place, your kids are an abject failure.
So you're left to wrestle with the angst of knowing (a) your kids are surfing the web despite your restrictions, or (b) your progeny are morons
All the best!
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Why do you want to cripple your kids like this?
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Get an app that allows you to whitelist sites. Any blacklist will be out of date or full of holes. With a whitelist, you pick where they are allowed to go.
Re: Good (Score:1)
Best advice I've seen so far is to put every internet-connected screen in a public place. No TV's or cellphones in bedrooms or bathrooms, just do homework and social media in the living room, dining room, family room, etc...and you (the parents) also spend your time there.
This creates a fundamentally healthy family environment and allows for some mild monitoring, but avoids the need for explicit rules and saves you from having to introduce ideas about sexually-charged imagery to a 10-year-old. The rules are
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What is the best way to achieve this?
You could understand that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, both physically and emotionally. The more you censor, the more your 10 year-old will feel drawn to the materials you are forbidding.
You could then move up to understanding that your 10 year-old is not stupid, and is very curious. And then understand that your desire to censor is an expression of YOUR fears, not your child's. Help your child understand what porn is, why it exists, and why you are afraid of it.
Porn's not going away,
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Admit defeat. Raise the children to have a little more emotional resilience, so that if they do see anything terrible they can just calmly close the tab and move on.
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a blindfold
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So your hosts file has filtered out every single porn site on the net?
That's one hell of a good reason not to use it.
The best filter... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2)
VNC would work for that.
Not quite sure how you'd do that on a tablet or phone, which is what most kids use these days.
This also somewhat assumes they're not using their cellular data to avoid the local network filters.
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I do have to point out the fact that most porn is not a depiction of sex but is rather a depiction of power.
Also, the men and women in a lot of porn are representative of a body ideal that is not achievable by most of the consumers of that porn. This continues to reinforce the unrealistic body ideals that people are holding themselves and potential partners to.
Also, if you are basing your personal sexual contact on what you have seen in porn, you and your partner are going to be left wanting in the bedroom.
Re: (Score:2)
re paragraph1: Sometimes that's clearly true, other times it depends on what you read into it.
re paragraph2: Yes. But no more so than movie stars, TV reporters, etc.
re paragraph3: Yes, but... Your personal relationships should be based mainly around personalities and secondarily around other reasons to be attracted, or you will be disappointed in life, not just in the bedroom.
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Funny, I find porn body types to be much more realistic than those in "normal" TV. In porn you can see fat people, ugly people, people of all races, amputees, etc.
Looking forward to comment from QET (Score:2)
Just the other day on Slashdot, people were telling me how absolutely nobody could ever want a kid-safe internet service, because you can just install filtering software on all of your devices.
I'm curious to see what they think of this study.
(Also curious if they were never 12 or 13 years old and showing their parents how to use technology.)
Re: (Score:1)
I believe the logic is that any method that is used to make an internet service kid-safe can be exactly replicated through filtering software. So if filtering software is not effective, neither is a kid-safe internet service.
There are different degrees of kid-safe. At one end you could white-list a few select kid friendly sites. The upside with internet service doing this is that there is no way to work around it from your computer. Any filtering software on the computer can be worked around by a savvy enou
My friend's service was a bit smarter. Analyze (Score:2)
You mentioned the most simple possible approaches, a whitelist, or a blacklist. A comprehensive blacklist is actually too large to install client-side, but there are much more advanced approaches available.
You can of course go to Google and get a list of sites covering any topic, such as perhaps "compare ease of learning different server-side programming languages", even though Google has not made such a list. You know there are far more advanced methods for categorizing content than using a pre-generated
what a waste of money (Score:3)
just about every kid could have told them filters don't work
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But the first one to tell them would get beat up by the rest.
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Proper research helps in convincing policy makers. They don't tend to believe kids.
Although, having said that, a lot of them don't give a fuck about actual science either.
Im just waiting for (Score:2)
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Oddly specific, small number but large range (Score:2)
"The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools"
Oddly specific, but why the large range? And why so few households, presumably out of an entire country?
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"The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools"
Oddly specific, but why the large range? And why so few households, presumably out of an entire country?
Different filtering products and block lists.
In the best case a particular filter worked 1 out of 17 times. In the worst case a particular filter worked 1 out of 77 times. Implied is the other filters worked a percentage of the time somewhere in between those.
It's like comparing spam filters on Google and Hotmail, there is a vast difference in effectiveness between those two.
But studies like these tend to not want to link manufacturer/company names to specific numbers. It may make their source of funding
How its worked for me (Score:1)
Not speaking about younger children but with young teens my experience is that once blocked from something they want to see, they will find other ways to get to it and diligently figure out how to hide that fact from you. Don't bet on figuring it out.
I have had better luck explaining what it is, why they shouldn't watch it and then telling them that I am going to give them the responsibility to not purposely view it. I also open the door to ask questions they have about it without cracking jokes or making f
Re: (Score:2)
So what exactly did you tell them when you explained why they shouldn't watch it? :p
Re:How its worked for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. As a teenager my dad sat me down and basically admitted he could do nothing to stop me from doing whatever I wanted. He said, "So don't disappoint me and know that I'm here to help if you need."
In another discussion, he agreed that if I was ever at a party and too drunk to drive home I could call him and he'd pick me up, no questions asked. His reasoning was that if I'm was responsible enough to call for a ride then I was responsible enough to drink. Never took him up on it but it meant a lot to me that he was putting the responsibility on me.
More people in this world need a dad like mine.
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I was going to post something very similar to this.
Basically, do you due diligence and block the low hanging fruit so that the bar isn't *nothing* and then, when you find your kid accessing porn, just have a frank, judgement free conversation about it. Let them know that you are there to answer any questions they might have about it.
It's not about being a prude or not, it's about instilling a healthy sense of what sex and intimate contact is all about.
Sexual gratification should never be at the expense of a
Good luck. (Score:1)
Without being signed in at google.com all you have to do is search bare breast and viola', you have lovely bare breast of all sizes and colors. How exactly are you going to prevent them from seeing this content again?
I suggest lots of education and embarrassing conversations with your child. Explaining to them that porn is fantasy and that it is not how relationships work. Explain what exactly sex is and don't dance around the subject. The penis goes inside the vagina. Pulling out isn't good enough because
Re: (Score:3)
Without being signed in at google.com all you have to do is search bare breast and viola', you have lovely bare breast of all sizes and colors.
I tried that, but none of the pictures showed a string instrument.
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There are filters that work, but.... (Score:2)
For example. don't most human beings have a filter that enables them to choose whether or not to look at porn? Obviously there can be neurologically atypical patterns that might be the exception to this, but generally speaking, this is going to be true for most people.
The brain follows the laws of physics, so there is nothing physically impossible about being able to detect whether or not something is porn.
This ultimately only means tha
I guess I just don't understand the problem (Score:2)
Whenever I watch tvision, at the start of every show, there's a big obvious black square in the corner, with an audience rating provided by the content authors. It's there for all of the expected reasons -- viewer discretion is advised.
Is it so difficult to regulate that web-sites do the same? A simple HTTP header X-AudienceRating would do just fine. Don't do it, or lie with it, and police show up at your door. Welcome to teeth.
Overblocking is only ever a concern because you're expected to be able to acc
Those are voluntary ratings. Porn sites have them (Score:2)
Those ratings are voluntary, not legally mandated. Web sites can use the exact same MTA rating system and some do. More use a different rating system. A lot of porn sites use the meta tag, but very few non-porn sites do, so that reduces the usefulness.
Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to explain WHY the system is voluntary and trying to pass a law about it doesn't work - at all. Perhaps someone else will be kind enough to explain that.
There *is* a US law that in effect says that all porn sites m
Re: (Score:2)
That's awesome, I had no idea about 2257. I'll add that to the list, like the beeping traffic lights, that I wish people would be taught.
Example please (Score:2)
i've been behind enough corporate firewalls to see that a blocked site is blocked. How would a smart kid circumvent a strong setup?
Waitaminute (Score:1)
Life, uh . . . . finds a way (Score:2)
John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh well, there it is. - Dr. Ian Malcolm
nothing new here... (Score:1)
I had no trouble accessing porn as an adolescent back in the 80s without the internet so not sure why now would be any different.
make love not war (Score:5, Insightful)
It's OK if they see a dozen bloody murders each hour. OK to commit murders while gaming. But doG forbid they should see lovemaking!
The murdering is OK with most governments because they know it's usually for some patriotic cause, and these mindless masses who love simulated killing will be easy to recruit into warriors for the rich. Cannon fodder.
You can delay, at any rate (Score:2)
Put the family computer in the living room. No pocket internet connected devices (it's not yet considered child abuse to not get them cell phones).
No point making it easy, or too soon. Let them get a bit older and get some maturity.
Explain what's out there, at age appropriate levels.
Purpose (Score:1)
How to filter the internet (Score:2)
2. Create a list of sites a nations internet users are never allowed to use.
3. Go back over list of sites users looked at for any usage of the sites that are not allowed.
4. Look for repeated and long term use of sites that are not allowed.
5. Send plainclothes police to have a shutdown with people who use the sites most often and for a long time.
6. Detect changes in usage patterns.
7. People who don't stop using the internet in that way get more poli
What the goal of filtering is (Score:2)
That said the only sure porn filter is a personal determination to avoid it. This is only achieved through learning and teaching correct principles and allowing the individual to implement those principles.
Those correct principles are: Viewing p
filters don't porn (Score:1)
Standards would help (Score:3)
As someone who distributes porn on the Internet, I've always been frustrated by the lack of a standardized rating mechanism, so that it will only be displayed when people actually want to see it, and content won't be accidentally cached by search engines. Few people believe that the ancient "rating" meta tag means anything to search engines, though I do use that just in case.
It would be nice to work on that first before crying about porn being too easily accessible.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, that would be a good idea if everyone who made "porn" were making porn for salacious purposes. Not everything that is designated as porn in your mind was made to satisfy lascivious desires, so how would THAT kind of content be tagged by the creator?
Imagine this: Guy gets his girlfriend to fuck a dog. Guy and girl split up. Guy is mad at girl and distributes pictures of her fucking a dog. Would he tag it as porn? Definitely not. He has an incentive to NOT classify it as porn. I used this example since
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Well, yeah, but pretty much by definition any rating system embedded into a web page is self-cencorship and strictly voluntary. If your intentions are not direct and up front, then no standard will help.
It would still be nice if there was one, even if there were only 3-5 possible settings. Leave it to the regulators to endlessly debate how many zillions of categories would be needed for a "proper" rating system (which is fine, as we all know it would always be too complicated to be implemented, let alone