Problems Over Porn On Library Computers
from the emotional-reaction dept
Well, this case fits so well with the fears of those who pushed the Supreme Court to say it's ok to force libraries to put filters on their computers that it almost feels like a set up. Apparently, a library in the Chicago area has turned off a bunch of their computers, after a child found porn on them. The library doesn't use filters, and has a very reasonable explanation for that: the filters don't work. They explain that if they just put these non-working filters on the computers, parents would believe the computers were safe and wouldn't monitor their children - but the children would still see porn. The grandmother of the kid who spotted the porn seems to ignore the important part of that policy, and is convinced it's possible to filter out all porn (probably because AOL tells her so). She says it must be possible because she can block porn out at home. She's even gone so far as to file a report with the police about this. Now, clearly, it's not a good thing that this kid found porn on a computer (in the children's part of the library, no less), but the important point is that filters wouldn't have stopped this. Requiring filters would have just made people even less likely to keep an eye on what people on those computers were doing - and could also block out perfectly legitimate sites.
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pr0n surfing
I'm all for the concept that people should be free to access whatever "information" they see fit, but that right comes with a responsibility and the assumption that a person can exercise that right with a degree of appropriateness in their actual conduct.
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Spam filters may not work 100%...
Now I don't know where the kid was, but I suspect it wasn't an obscure site. It was probably a site like redlight.com or whitehouse.com. Someplace that the kid may have had what he/she thought was a ligitimate site.
Now, will filters ever block all sites. No. Or they will wind up blocking legitimate sites that don't have any porn in them. Should parents assume their kids are safe when they have filters on? NO! Parents need to take responsibility for their children and what they see and do. You can't set a child down in front of just about anything and assume they are safe.
As far as AOL being safe. HA! AOL is probably one of the most dangerous places on the net. Mostly because parents think that when they hear AOL claiming that their service is save it must be true. So they let their kids run anywhere they want on AOL including chatrooms and once a kid goes into a chatroom, no matter what the room, they will start getting IM's, e-mail, etc... and it won't take long before their e-mail box starts filling up with all kinds of unpleasant stuff.
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More than just a filter issue - bad administration
Many libraries in the Chicago area put filters on the kid computers and leave the adult computers unfiltered, but this kind of optimization just provided a workaround to the filters.
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Why
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Re: Why
And as to filters blocking access to legitemate sites, I think there's like 77.3 bazillion legitemate sites on the internet. Will anyone miss a couple hundred of them? Or thousand? What's the big deal? Especially since most of the sites that get blocked are legitemate sites that talk about the biology of sex, etc. It's impossible to find those sites anyway even on unfiltered computers, since all you'll get for those searches is porn.
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Re: Why
I wouldn't want my child to not be able to see those sites at the library if necessary.
Progams like netnanny and cybercop block most non-judeo-christian conservative sites on the web.
Any site that deals with Homosexuality, Alternative religions, abortion, or any other controvertial subject is normally blocked.
If I wanted this level of government control over what I or my children can see, I'd move to Bejing.
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