Online safety has been at the media forefront of late. The PM’s announcement on 22nd July created quite a stir; debate, anger, relief and all manner of other emotions. Frustratingly some media reporting has also caused confusion and frustration through a lack of understanding of the two very separate issues at hand
- The illegal vile images and videos of children being abused which are on the Internet
- The free and easy access to adult orientated material by children.
Few will argue that as much as possible needs to be done to tackle the former, and I hope the PM’s announcement is only a first step of many. Tackling this content on the world wide web is one thing, tackling it behind pay-per-view, the darknet, via P2P etc. is another.
It is the latter that has caused the stir and for all manner of completely understandable reasons:
- Technology making a human-based decision
- Fear that this is the beginning of censorship
- Concern that it will create a false sense of security
This is a huge area; as well as many other services, I used to manage an Internet filter on behalf of 110,000 educationally based users. I know how hard it is to balance the impossible question – what is appropriate? I know how difficult the technology can sometimes find it to differentiate between what is appropriate and what isn’t. For example, is www.blahblah.com a sex (porn) site, a sex(education) site, or a site dedicated to helping and supporting others. This is because in the main, Internet filters will use the words on the website to categorize.
You also have the question of age; what may be appropriate for a 16 year old, may not be appropriate for an 8 year old, therefore you can’t just differentiate between adult/child/young person.
I’ve already blogged about my initial thoughts; the purpose of this blog is to ask if you would be kind enough to fill out a very short poll so that I can get a better understanding of the feelings of others. I will be making the poll results public, and I will also be sending them to UKCCIS (UK Council for Cild Internet Safety) of which I am an associate member.
To fill out the poll (15 yes/no type questions) please click HERE and thank you very much.