Public Service Announcement: Her-own-eyes.org Inappropriate for Consumption by Small Children

Public Service Announcement: Her-own-eyes.org Inappropriate for Consumption by Small Children

NetSweeper, an Internet Filtering Solution, has apparently decided that her-own-eyes.org, the personal website of an innocent teenage girl, is a "Sex Site." How they got that idea, Almeda has no clue.

"Um, I've probably said 'sex' once or twice. [The letters "s," "e", and "x" have appeared consecutively 75 times in the history of her blog; 32 of those 75 were in the words "sexy," "ubersexy," "sexxxy," or "unsexy;" 15 of 71 in "sexual," "sexually," "sexuality," "bisexual," "heterosexual," "homosexual," or "homosexuality;" 9 of 71 in "sexier," "sexiest," or "sexiness;" 4 of 71 in "sexist" or "sexism;" 3 were in the word "sex" used to mean "gender;" and 11 times did they appear in quotes from other sources or titles. --ed.] But this is far from a porn site or anything. I mean, I'm FIFTEEN. I'm a teenager. We sometimes talk about sex. But I hardly talk about it constantly, and I don't even have any slightly pornographic pictures anywhere on my site. Well, unless you count the linking to Billy Boyd pictures. He is, as I've said before, teh sex. The only other vaguely pornographic thing I can think of is the link in my links page to Pornography as a cause of rape. Does that count?"

NetSweeper has four major levels of filtering: level 0, level 1, level 2, and allow only. Level 0 has no Internet filtering. At Level 1, all sites which are not in a banned category or are uncategorized will appear. The banned categories are "Criminal Skills," "Cults," "Dating," "Drugs," "Extreme," "Gambling," "Hate Speech," "Sex," "Web Usenet News," and "Proxy Anonymisers," the third to last of which Almeda's site apparently falls into.

Level 1 is divided into two sublevels: 1a and 1b. 1a is the same as Level 1 except that "the key word scanning or URL's and searches will also be enabled." At Level 1b, "Online Gaming" and "Web Based Chat" are added to the banned categories.

Level 2 blocks "common search engines, which allow users to easilliy [sic] find pornographic web sites." It generously allows child-friendly search engines such as Yahooligans to be accessed.

Allow only allows only the following categories: "Entertainment," "General News," "Humour," "Job Search," "On-line Sales," "Politics and Religion," "Self-Help," "Sports," "Travel sites," "News Sites," "Book Review sites," "Resarch [sic] sites (informational sites)," "Movie review sites," "36 ms music artist sites," "Online portal sites," and "Educational Sites."

"If you ask me," says Almeda, although nobody did, "a so-called filtering solution is not doing its job if it filters completely harmless sites such as my own." Some people disagree. Colin, who only recently turned 12, says, "Her-own-eyes.org has scarred me for life. I hadn't even heard the word 'sex' before I went there, let alone knew what it is. My innocence is lost! I can only turn to Jesus now and hope he forgives me. Read Chick tracts!" (.mp3)

Almeda | 21.12.02 14:17 | TrackBack