If it weren’t that so many schools and libraries are required to use Internet content filters, as opposed to dumb, set-and-forget home users, this sort of thing would be funny.
“Internet Filters” updates and expands upon an earlier survey published by the Brennan Center’s Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP) in 2001. The new report describes the effects of CIPA and the deceptiveness of manufacturers’ claims to have improved the accuracy of filters with sophisticated “artificial intelligence” techniques. It then describes nearly 100 tests and studies up through 2006, with hundreds of examples of both deliberate and accidental overblocking.
For instance, one filtering program, SurfWatch, blocked the University of Kansas’s Archie R. Dykes Medical Library website upon detecting the word “dykes.” Cyber Patrol blocked a Knights of Columbus site and a site for aspiring dentists when set to block only “sexually explicit” materials. SmartFilter blocked the Declaration of Independence, Shakespeare’s complete plays, Moby Dick, and Marijuana: Facts for Teens, a brochure published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
It’s a tough one. How do you keep kids from cruising for free porn (or inadvertently stumbling across it) on library and school computers. Answer: you probably can’t, any mroe than you can keep them from cruising for sex in the fiction and non-fiction sections of the library (or inadvertently stumbling across it, as well).
What you can do is try to reach a compromise between privacy (people may be doing “legitimate” private stuff on a library computer, like checking their e-mail) and publicity (computer areas should be well lit and visible), so that you keep such locations from being the equivalent of darkened peep shows. That’s a compromise likely to please nobody, but it’s the best one possible without engaging in ths sort of futile filtering (and overblocking) described above.
(via BoingBoing)