Internet Filtering: can the Government be Trusted?

[Penguin54]

So the Government has prevailed on the ISPs and they will be implementing filters on the Internet from next year:

www.theweek.co.uk/technology/56109/google-and-microsoft-pledge-block-child-pornography

OK it is a great headline, but what they say in their promises is weak:

"Around 100,000 search terms will no longer return results leading to illegal material. For 13,000 search terms linked with child sex abuse, warnings will flash up telling the user that the content could be illegal and offering advice on where to seek help."

So what they are saying is not that they will clean up the internrt feeds at all, they will just block the illegal stuff, the legal (!) stuff will still be available, and the warnings will just make it more "exciting". Lets face facts, Google are very focussed on feeding advertising to as many users as possible (its how they make money) and Microsoft have little incentive to block anything (It costs them to do it and earns them nothing).

So that being the case, where do I go to get protection for my kids?

Any Suggestions?

Get netnanny or similar, and use it? Supervise and monitor your dc when online?

Is NetNanny that good? If it works, why is there the big hoo-haa about filtering? And if it runs on the PC that my DC is using, could it be hacked....or am I just paranoid?

MN's geeks have been saying for some time that the Government initiative is useless.

You need device based filters (especially once your DC have smart phones or tablets) - maybe K9 (free, good).

Then you need to ensure Internet access is permitted only in shared parts of the house, and that you can communicate well with your DC about Internet safety. Education, so your DC make enlightened choices, is the best - and possibly only - defence.

And you really need to work on this from the off. By the time they are at secondary it's probably too late.

Netnanny etc work better than ISP level filters, but too many people can't be arsed putting in the effort, or they simply don't think/realise, and want someone else to do it for them. Edith's advice is good, but your dc will look for stuff you'd rather they didn't. In My Day, it was looking up the dictionary or encyclopaedia for "sex" (in the school dictionary, this was rather disappointingly boy or girl!) "willies" or whatever, now it's straight to google.

You don't go anywhere to protect your kids, you can't. You can watch them and nanny them when they are small, but they grow, they get 3G phones, iPods, the go in FB at friends, they set up email accounts you don't know they have. They message each other at school, they send texts.

You can no more monitor your children today than our parents could monitor who we rang from the call box at the bottom of the road or who I chatted to in the park.

Children grow up - get used to it!

its just a vote winner for Cameron from people who don't understand how the internet works.

What boney said. The govt haven't got the faintest idea what they are on about and are hoping that people will fall for it when they say they've made the ISP's "do something", when actually the ISP's are just doing the what they've been doing for years. Of course the govt like to pretend that the ISP's haven't been doing anything at all.

And they also seem to be hoping that no one will spot that most of this is talking about Google and Bing who are not ISP's, and so not relevant to what the govt were on about anyway. And neither Google or Bing are compulsory (even if they'd like to be).

It's all bluster and bollocks as always.