FREE FILTER FOR AUSTRALIA

Personally, I dont think government should be involved in filtering in any way. No matter how good a cause it seems, its just not long-term safe. Even if you trust the government now, how can you trust the government ten or twenty years from now? What happens if someone comes to power who wants to use the filter for something other than what it was intended? Once the technology is in place, so is the potential for abuse, and that is just too much power to be entrusted to anyone.

But this is an offer for a free third party filter programme. It is the user who dictates when to install, uninstall it, and also what is filtered etc. It is clearly offered as a salve to those who are concerned about internet content, presumably particuarly in relation to what kids can access. Whether or not anyone takes up on the offer is entirely voluntary. I think it is a great idea.

I worry about that as well. While I think filtering and monitoring software is good from the stand point of helping people who are struggling with porn stay accountable, putting one's specific surfing habits in the hands of an unrelated and unknown third party (governement or otherwise) could potentially open the door for all kinds of problems if that third party wanted to somehow use that information against the user. There are a lot of good reasons why porn users keep their surfing habits a secret in the first place. Making that information explicitly available to an unknown third party might not be the smartest thing to do from the standpoint of minimizing adverse consequences.

For example, that kind of information could easily be used to take down a prominent politician or religious leader, ruin someone's marriage or possibly make a legal case against someone. Under the right circumstances, the temptation to exploit such private information for personal or political gain might be too much for people entrusted with such confidential information to handle. Those people are imperfect humans like the rest of us and assuming that every one of them is 100% honest and that none of them will ever misuse the information is probably a poor assumption.

I do think filtering and monitoring software can be useful tools but the risks associated with the transmission of private information to unrelated third parties should be carefully considered and weighed. Most people are not prominent enough to be a likely target of a political smear campaign and would likely just blend in with the millions of other users.

As long as the average user is not looking at anything that could potentially be deemed illegal, the average person should be OK at least for now. I wouldn't trust a filtering company, particularly a government one, not to turn over potential evidence of a crime to police.

As a follow-up to my last post, I imagine the media would be interested in publically displaying Elliot Spitzer's detailed internet surfing logs if such were readily available and clearly showed him to be an avid porn user or perhaps revealed the names of other high end escort services that he might have also frequented. Would someone at a filtering company leak such information to the media? I don't know. Could the police require the filtering company to turn over that information if they felt it contained evidence in support of their case? Probably.

I dont trust a private company any more than I trust government - as long as its a private agreement between filterer and user, no problem. But the moment the government endorses or regulates a filter, that sets of warnings for me.

David, most single-computer filters dont keep centralised logs, so its probably not an issue. I would be concerned that widespread use of the filter might be used as an justification for manditory internet filtering - if the people want it, some politician will suggest making it more convenient.

Putting aside the privacy worries, I also see political abuse as a possibility. When I worked at a school, we blocked all access to political sites on abortion - pro-life and pro-choice alike. But a filter company with an executive interested in the subject might decide to set the threshold for inclusion a lot higher for one than the other. Substitute the contriversial issue of your choice as an example.

Interestingly, xxxchurch.com was blocked in the class 'occult and non-traditional religions.'

I have a suggestion: Get some geeks together, and make an open-source filter. That way it would be entirely trustworthy and open. It should be possible to make one as a context-filtering module for privoxy, together with a bit of code to prevent changing the proxy settings in the browser.

My guess is that a filtering company that tracks the sites that someone visits and reports them to an accountability partner would have access to the sites that someone visits. While a privacy agreement may be in place, this information could potentially be abused under the right circumstances. A privacy agreement doesn't necessarily mean that the person(s) entrusted will honor such agreement. In some instances, the filtering company may be legally compelled to release such information notwithstanding their desire to honor the agreement.

I don't think the average filter user has anything to worry about as it would be bad for business for the filtering company to regularly use that information against their customers. If customers don't have confidence that the company will respect their privacy, they are unlikely to sign up for the filter, which work against the filtering company. The privacy issue and the potential for abuse is just something to consider.

"My guess is that a filtering company that tracks the sites that someone visits and reports them to an accountability partner would have access to the sites that someone visits."

Oh yes, definatly. But the software I was discussion was regular cencorware, not accountability. It doesn't tell anyone you tried to look, just stops you looking.

"In some instances, the filtering company may be legally compelled to release such information notwithstanding their desire to honor the agreement."

A return to my fear of the legal hammer combined with technological ignorance. If some government department demands mass-transfer of data for a purpose like pedophile-finding or counter-terrorism, what company would dare turn it down? And then its fed into someone's pet data-mining project, and for every actual pedophile or terrorist they find there are a hundred false positives.

I note that the blocklists for commercial filtering products are *always* kept very secretive - the user has no way to know what is blocked, only to test a specific site. So there is much scope for political bias. It need not even be deliberate - a social conservative might decide to block all gay-rights sites as 'adult' because he believes children should not be reading any material discussing human sexuality. Or, conversely, a liberal might block all sites campaigning against gay marriage as 'hate speech.' They wouldn't even realise they were favouring one political position over another - it would seem like common sense.

The more I consider this, the greater the need I see for an accountable, open filter. Good luck though - to make that you need open-source coders, and those people have a fanatical dedication to free speech matched only by the ACLU. I dont think the 'lesser of two evils' argument will work well.

While the filtering company does choose which sites to block/allow, they do generally allow the user to customer unblock or block sites as they see fit. The privacy issue still exists though and they could potentially form opinions about the user based on what their custom edits to the filter.

So I thought I would get creative (the good christian that I am) and thought I could try to get in on the Austrailan free filter deal...

It didn't work. It was like 3 in the morning - I decided to make a fake yahoo e-mail account on Yahoo Austraila - I logged in some bogus Austrailan postal code - and in the end... somehow they caught on that I live in Mexico and not Austraila and I couldn't get my free filter afterall.

Now I know that filters are a business - and while accountability stuff may be good for some... I would really love to get a free filter.

I mean, you are wanting to keep junk out of your life - and I know that in the end we should just follow conviction and look for the "way of escape" - but I have looked and looked and looked and have not found a free "FILTER" out there anywhere.

Austrailans - take atvantage of this stuff - there are those of us in the world who would LOVE to have a free filter but cannot afford one.

Please take atvantage of it!