The UK residents massively refuse to install filters that eliminate adult content. According to experts, this is due to the fact that the British want to watch porn on the Internet.
The four largest Internet service providers in the United Kingdom – Virgin Media, British Telekom, Sky and TalkTalk – offered all their new users a pilot service: compulsory filtering of websites with “18 +” content , and not only at the user level but also at the level of the provider. It happened in July 2013 after the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron announced that the government came to an agreement with service providers to introduce this feature.
And this week the British media process controller Ofcom summarized the first results of this experiment: every seventh resident agreed to filter traffic.
The overall picture on the largest British providers is as follows: 5% of new British Telecom users, 8% of new Sky users, 36% of new TalkTalk user and only 4% of new Virgin Media users agreed to filter traffic.
It must be noted that forced filtration was proposed to only 35% of new Virgin Media users.
TalkTalk is knocked out of the picture, and this is due to the fact that its Internet filter has been available to customers since May 2011. British Telecom and Sky offered the function at the end of 2013. Virgin Media introduced its filter only in February 2014, in violation of the terms established by the British authorities.
As for Russian private users, they are free to visit websites that contain adult content, and parents decide themselves to install Internet filters on children computers or not.
“According to the data given by Kaspersky Lab, more than 50% of children in Russia freely visit different websites,” reports Safe Internet League CEO Denis Davydov. At the same time, every fourth child faces an online manifestation of cruelty and aggression. “And what especially dangerous is that only 39% of children turn to their parents for help, when they face unpleasant situations on the Internet,” – said Davydov.
According to the Safe Internet League, nowadays only 12.8% of parents use content filters on their computers. “In fact, the level of Internet literacy of parents is not sufficient to distinguish between harmful and safe information for children, as well as to choose the right way to protect children from harmful content” – added Davydov.
Denis Davydov supposed that the skeptical attitude of users to the idea of pre-filtration is connected with distrust of those procedures that will be used to filter content. ”People are afraid that content filtering is going to be rough and excessive and that they won’t be able to get some important information from search services. But these are the fears of ordinary people caused due to their lack of knowledge about the pre-filtration procedures. Thus each user must have right to refuse this service,” he said.
It is interesting that in January 2014 many foreign experts expressed skepticism about the idea of content filtering for child protection. The head of the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) Diane Duke criticized the initiative of the British Prime Minister on the pages of The Telegraph.
According to her, even though these filters help children to be protected from the information that it is too early for them to know, but they cannot protect children from the real online dangers, and filters of the providers create dangerous illusion of child protection on the Internet. “The real online dangers like cyber threats, proxy servers, p2p-systems are not controlled by these filters,” said Duke.
“It can be difficult to find common ground with technologies but basically the education of children is the hardest work. And if you want to have children, the interaction with the dangers which the society creates for them is one of the nowadays conditions,” the expert added.
Source: газета.ru
