Protecting children, particularly students, from inappropriate web content, is something most parents, voters and politicians agree on. In the UK we have the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre  (CEOP) who advise parents worried about their children’s web habits that, ‘it may be necessary to log or monitor their conversations, and this can be done though some forms of filtering software’. Great, except that filters don’t really work, as the Australian government found out recently after wasting £34.8m of taxpayers’ money.

Australian politicians fell over themselves to support the NetAlert programme whose motto is Protecting Australian Families Online. The programme is run by the local media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, on behalf of the federal Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

NetAlert offered three free commercial filters to parents, libraries, and schools. While politicians were slapping themselves on the back, a sixteen year-old student, Tom Wood, took just 20 minutes to crack the first three commercial filters. Undaunted, the regulators then added their own local filter, Interguard, which Wood cracked in 10 minutes. The brilliance of Wood’s cracking (as opposed to hacking) was that to parents and teachers the filters still looked as if they were running, when in fact they were disabled. Not only had Wood beaten ‘the man’, he had very publicly shown what a monumental waste of time (and money) this approach to children’s online safety is. As a former victim of cyberbullying, Wood said,‘filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway. Cyberbulling, educating children how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix’.

Maybe if our regulators listened to people like Wood the money they invest in this area might actually help protect children rather than just filling the coffers of companies who develop filtering software.
www.ceop.gov.uk
www.netalert.gov.au