Study: Porn filters remain problematic

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- Schools and libraries using government-mandated software designed to shield children from sexually explicit Internet content run the very real risk of denying teens access to vital health information, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health philanthropy organization, examined different sensitivity levels of six popular content filtering programs used to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act. As reported in the Dec. 11 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study requested 24 information categories through six popular Internet search engines. Researchers tracked what results were blocked, said Vicky Rideout, KFF vice president.

"The (filters) can be set to block related categories, such as lingerie, profanity or nudity ... weapons or hate speech," Rideout told a news conference. "When we try to go beyond just blocking pornography, filters can seriously impede searches for health information, especially on sexual health issues, where they block as many as one out of every two sites."

The health information requests ranged from breast cancer and HIV to condoms, pregnancy, abortion and gay health, Rideout said. The filters' most restrictive settings blocked gay health sites 60 percent of the time, but breast cancer only 7 percent, she said.

The same settings caught 91 percent of pornographic sites, but that is only 4 percent more than the most lenient configurations, Rideout said. The list of legitimate but blocked sites included the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and government agency Web pages discussing the failure rate of various types of birth control, she said.

Libraries have fought CIPA all the to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing the filters violate freedom of speech, said Matt James, KFF senior vice president.

"Whatever happens at the Supreme Court, the likelihood is that filters in many schools are here to stay, given schools' interest in protecting students from pornography and protecting themselves legally," James told reporters.

That present serious difficulties for children who rely on school computers as their only Internet access, said study author Dr. Caroline Richardson, a practicing family physician and educator at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Many of those same children are likely to lack insurance or regular medical care, she told the news conference. Some of her own teenage patients have utilized Web sites while deciding to seek treatment, or to supplement the information she provides, she said.

Filter providers should create a single Web site for health care sites to check if legitimate information they provide is being blocked, Richardson said.

Some software companies, such as N2H2 of Seattle, already provide such services, but a consolidated site is certainly workable, said David Burt, N2H2's manager of public relations. Such an approach would help concerned citizen groups collaborate more closely with the technology community, said Donna Rice Hughes, author of several books on protecting children from online dangers.

The study, however, validates criticism of CIPA's filter-centric approach, said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association's Washington office. Engaging older children and teens, discussing their online activities and educating them to possible dangers, is the only way to really protect them, she told the news conference.

Another problem with public facilities use of the filters involves deciding what sensitivity level to select for the software, said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Responsible Netizen Institute -- a nonprofit dedicated to the safe use of the Internet -- and a research associate at the University of Oregon's Center for Advanced Technology in Education. Such decisions must be arrived at with full public disclosure to help prevent legitimate sites from being blocked, she told the press conference.

The variability in filters' settings is only compounded by the variety of information, good and bad, available online, said Michael McGee, vice president of education at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Blocking some useful sites could end up pointing teens to information colored by ideological or religious views, perhaps to the point of becoming misinformation, he told the news conference.