There has been a lot of coverage about Internet child safety in the UK press recently. This has been due to the cross-party Parliamentary inquiry into child protection online and its renewed calls for the blocking of adult content on the internet. As I wrote in my last post, they found that children were easily accessing pornography online and said that exposure to it was having a ‘negative impact’ on attitudes towards sex, relationships and body image.

It called on the Government to once again consider a compulsory opt-in scheme for accessing adult content online. The inquiry also recommended that all public Wifi networks should have a ‘default adult-content bar’.

According to the Daily Mail, Google reacted by saying “parents are to blame if children view porn and it attacks call for legal curbs”.

Google executive Naomi Gummer says “it is a ‘myth’ that laws can protect children from internet pornography”. I would have to agree with this in part. Laws don’t protect children. Parents do. However, laws and technology can help parents to protect their children.

I believe mandating all ISPs and mobile device vendors to provide new and improved family safety controls that actually work, is a great idea. When I represented MetaCert during the consultation of the Parliamentary inquiry, I suggested that parents should be able to easily opt-out of pornography. Family safety controls today are all based on old methods and technologies. Here’s one example of how Google SafeSearch isn’t the answer.

Here’s more evidence of Google’s level of insight to family safety. According to Gummer

the extent of sexual content online had been exaggerated and that only a tiny minority of children are ‘upset’ by what they see.

Really? It doesn’t take a genius or any number of industry reports to see that children are too easily exposed to porn when using Google or YouTube.

Try yourself. Google “play girl” in the hope that you will find girls toys. Notice how the kid-safe search results are mixed with porn sites?

According to Gummer

Twenty-five per cent of kids have seen sexual images, but only 14 per cent saw them online,’ she said. ‘Of that, 4 per cent say they were upset by the images, 2 per cent of those images are hard-core and violent, and the rest is nudity in the same way as perhaps seen in the offline world.

So, of the 14% of kids who have seen sexual images, only 4% were upset? Er, does that mean it’s ok to expose kids to porn if they like it? Isn’t this the reason why kids are actually becoming addicted to porn as I covered in my last post?

Google is being very irresponsible and it should try to improve its own family safety controls. Perhaps they’re afraid that YouTube will eventually be completely blocked given that it can be a dangerous playground for kids to hang out in.

My offer to the Daily Mail

1. The Daily Mail has a campaign to back the Government’s goal to help parents protect kids from pornography.
2. I would like to invite them (the Daily Mail) to work with MetaCert to help companies that provide Internet access, improve their family safety controls. We can do this by offering our massive index of 609 million pages of pornography for free. That’s the largest data set of its kind worldwide – used strictly for Internet family safety.

Disclaimer

I must assert that MetaCert and me personally as its CEO, do not have an opinion on what is and what is not appropriate for people on the Web. We simply provide the technology that helps parents to better protect their kids.