Engagements

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Prime Minister – in the House of Commons at 11:30 am on 21 July 2004.

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Photo of Judy Mallaber Judy Mallaber Labour, Amber Valley 11:30, 21 July 2004

Will my right hon. Friend congratulate British Telecom on its new system to block customers' access to child pornography websites? That stops a staggering 10,000 attempts a day to download images of children being abused and raped. Vodaphone has now agreed to use similar technology. Will the Prime Minister now call on all internet service providers and mobile phone companies to follow that example and help stamp out that despicable trade in children's misery?

Annotations

Chris Lightfoot
Posted on 22 Jul 2004 8:08 pm (Report this annotation)

This relates to this BBC story, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3908215.stm (which claims that BT are blocking not ten but twenty thousand "attempts to access child porn" every day). BT's "Clean feed" system itself is explained in this article from the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/07/bt_cleanfeed_analysi...

From that description it seems likely that the system yields numerous "false positives"; that is, it will block some sites which are perfectly legitimate. This will inflate the headline figure, which is good for public relations, but less good for BT's (presumably) largely law-abiding customers.

On the other hand, if there really are 10-20,000 attempts per day to access illegal material through BT's network, one wonders why BT do not "track those trying to log onto the sites or pass their details on to police", since according to a spokesman they are trying to do something worthwhile to "stem to the tide of child abuse" and not engaging in a cheap publicity stunt at all.

Gregory Block
Posted on 23 Jul 2004 2:43 pm (Report this annotation)

This, and all systems of its nature, do indeed yield false positives; the organisation is free to choose its definition of what is blockable, and a process after-the-fact can get someone unblocked; but there is not necessarily notification that someone has been blocked, so companies that do end up on that list may not be aware that they have been blocked by that body.

Also worth noting: That's "hits" per day - that does not necessarily mean that one hit equals one individual, nor that the hits are generated by a living human being (robot crawlers, spam mail, people clicking on spam, malware/adware, etc.)

What this is amounts to a lot of expensive hardware and a simple filter; and a limited one at that. What this amounts to is a slippery slope. It won't stop the "problem" people, may (and that's *may*) stop casual users running into this content accidentally, and will definitely lead to problems in the future both with the process itself, and with the inevitable admittance of responsibility that BT's act entails.

It's good marketing, though. Little more.