First of all, let me make this perfectly clear: "I do not believe that content filters will protect our nations youth from the "evils" of this world and I do not advocate them in schools or public libraries because I believe they prevent minors from obtaining appropriate, useful, and much needed information."
Now that I have that out of the way, I do have a major issue with the research conducted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center as reported in the article Faulty Filters Block Access to Kid-Friendly Information on the Internet.
In the article it states: "If you go to the AltaVista search engine and search for "Arbor Heights Elementary," you will get back 824 hits. But if you use the Net Shepherd family-friendly search engine, only three documents are returned. In other words, Net Shepherd blocks access to more than 99 percent of the material that would otherwise be available on AltaVista containing the search phrase "Arbor Heights Elementary.
The author(s) goes on to state that "similar results" were obtained with other searches and other content-blocking search engines. However, what the researches fail to mention is if one of the three documents returned from the Net Shepherd Family-friendly search engine was the Arbor Heights Elementary School's homepage. For me, this information is key. If one of the documents was the homepage, then this still opens the door to a wealth of information concerning Arbor Heights Elementary School. On the other hand, if the three hits are totally unrelated to Arbor heights Elementary School, then this is also a huge problem! For example, when the author(s) discuss the Survey of Miscellaneous Concepts and Entities, they state: "[O]ne of the eight documents that was produced by [Family Search] turned out to be a parody of a Dr. Seuss story using details from the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson."
Please don't get me wrong; I am not trying to play word games here. I believe this information is necessary to make a solid case for the research conducted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and I feel like this information could have easily been presented in the article.
Electronic Privacy Information Center. (1997). Faulty Filters: How Content Filters Block Access to Kid Friendly Information on the Internet.
http://epic.org/reports/filter_report.html
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2 comments:
I agree, that was a totally bogus testing strategy. Searching only using a school name and getting 3 results is most likely a good thing, because the searcher is probably hoping to find the school's web site. Why would you want 800 links if all you want is the school web site? Now, if the searcher put in "(school name) book club 2009", or something more specific, and the filters allowed only 3 links, it is much more unlikely that the filters are blocking the needed/useful information. The author makes the point he is trying to: Filters block way too much. But the examples are not very well thought out, and therefore not convincing to someone in the know.
Michael,
I found your comments and perspectives on the EPIC's survey interesting. At first, I completely agreed with its study and findings (despite the fact that I cannot find the NetShepherd website as the URL is invalid).
After reading your thoughts and the other ones posted on your blog, I realized how ineffective their findings are, despite the best intentions of showing filters are fallible.
Very interesting assessment!
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