UK Prime Minister David Cameron has welcomed family-friendly internet porn filters being offered by ISPs stating that such filters were required to keep children from ‘stumbling across hardcore legal pornography’. Cameron was speaking to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
Cameron’s statement comes after ISPs in the UK announced their porn filter initiatives and announcements from Google and Microsoft that over 100,000 search terms will not return results that could point to illegal material. ISPs including BT, Sky and TalkTalk have also announced a £25 million online safety campaign to raise awareness among parents on how to tackle issues such as cyber-bullying and limit their kids’ access to online adult content.
Cameron said that work was being done to ensure that paedophiles don’t get access to images. The move by Microsoft and Google is more or less aimed at that, but Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) is of the opinion that such search restrictions won’t do any good as paedophiles didn’t use search engines to find such content. Gamble claimed that paedophiles use more unconventional “dark corners of the internet on peer-to-peer websites” to get access to such content.
The Prime Minister is of the opinion that there are those who are experimenting with such content through search engines and steps by Google and Microsoft will ensure that online searches will be devoid of illegal content thereby stopping them right on their tracks.
“You’ve got people who are dabbling in this, experimenting in this, and who are using the open internet and they won’t get search returns, so it stops their revolting journey as it were”, said Cameron.
Cameron did acknowledge that there were ‘dark net’ was being used to dig for such content. “There are some quite big sites where a lot of work happens, a lot of disgusting work happens, so if you can get after those big sites, you can deal with quite a lot of the problem”, he said.
What’s “hardware legal porn”?
What’s wrong with that? Porn shouldn’t be for kids. Plenty of moms and dad’s are finding out their kids as young as 7 are watching adult content. That’s not cool.