[yenoham]

TL;DR - "Yea I guess, but..."

Personally I don't have huge a problem with the default filtering; most households (with or without kids) don't have the knowledge to effectively enable filtering for all their devices - giving them 'protection' by default, and allowing the option to have full access is currently what most - maybe all - mobile phone operators do in the UK anyway in 3G/GSM connections.

However, its important that the opt-out is incredibly straight forward - an online form for example (ideally during signup with a new provider) - no need for 'humiliating' phone calls where you have to explain why you want to see Super Army of Boob 2, for example.

I do wonder what this will mean when accessing sites like The Pirate Bay - which often have boobs-a-plenty in the sidebar ads. Does it mean that people who visit sites that happen to have 'pornographic' ads ALSO need the filtering off.

My bigger concern here is that these measures will very likely do nothing to stem child pornography (and I would hazard a guess sexual abuse in general); my reasoning is that I don't imagine your average paedophile just opens their vanilla browser in the morning and Googles for '[child related sex terms]' - surely this kind of activity hides behind systems such as Tor?

One other thing that springs to mind; presumably, unless there is explicit legislation against this, ISPs can now sell your filter preferences for marketing purposes; perhaps putting you in some 'boxes' you wouldn't want to be in.

[infinita740]

>I do wonder what this will mean when accessing sites like The Pirate Bay

Don't worry about the pirate bay, it's blocked in uk

First torrent site, then pornography, then what? arbitrary political movements?

That's a really slippery slope here once the tools are in place, it's hard not to use them.

Personally I'm not against some filtering but IMHO it had to be an opt in plus made at the router level with an "offline" list that you can review and modify yourself. A list made at the ISP level is just too totalitarian

[brokenparser]

Targeted ads would be the least of my worries. What concerns me is fascist governments deciding they get to filter whatever they're contempt with. Such censorship doesn't fit well with civil liberties, we know this from other countries which already have nation-wide filtering.

[yenoham]

This is why I believe the 'opt-in/out' switching should be as seemless and accessible as possible - if it is, then to my mind this is no closer to censorship than the film classification system.

"By default the state assumes you don't want to see sexual content; if you do - thats fine by us"

Note that I'm saying this is how I see it balancing with civil liberties - there is of course the chance that it DOESN'T work out like this in practice.

[summerdown2]

I'm not sure this is as simple as an opt in/out switch for the user. It will also require the construction of a way of rating sites as in or out, which will lead to the government being able to choose sites to fall one side of the filter or the other.

It begins with porn, of course, but it's essentially creating the apparatus to censor at will.

[_mulder_]

Accessing the Pirate Bay?! We can't allow that... if only there was a compulsory National filter where we could block access to these corrupt sites.

[infinita740]

Actually I think they started with th Pirate Bay and then pornography.

A quick google search: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-bypass-uk-pirate-bay-blo...

(screenshot of the blocking page)

I believe protection against pornography has to do with education, it's more the problem of the parents than the problem of the government. "Childs" will always find a way to view some adult content, they just need to be educated about it

[desas]

They started with paedophilia, then piracy, and now pornography.