UK ISP Filters Criticised for Blocking Lots of Safe and Legal Websites

The Open Rights Group‏ (ORG) has this week helped to highlight how some of the UK’s biggest broadband ISPs are continuing to allow their Parental Control filters to block masses of innocent websites, often for seemingly bogus reasons (e.g. blocking a small gardening business for “pornography“).

Over the past few years all of the country’s largest ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk etc.), under pressure from the Government, have introduced new network-level filtering systems that can optionally be enabled by subscribers. Some providers, such as Sky Broadband, even enable these by default.

The intention has always been to help make the internet a safer place for children and some of the filtering systems can even target nasty phishing or malware-infected sites. Millions of broadband customers have now enabled such a service and it’s clearly useful, although there are a few big caveats.

Sadly such filters can be unreliable and often catch legitimate websites through errors, such as incorrect categorisation. Last year ISPreview.co.uk saw first-hand just how frustrating this can be when Sky wrongfully blocked our own site under their “Malware” category (here), which is something that we wouldn’t even have noticed had our readers not flagged it up.

Unfortunately the sheer size of the internet makes it very difficult to accurately gauge the scale of incorrect blocking. There are over 1 billion websites in the world today and so it’s unlikely that humans are manually verifying all of those on a regular basis (cost-effective automation will be used to categorise many sites and that can result in errors).

However the Open Rights Group have, for the past couple of years, been trying to keep tabs on the problem via Blocked.org.uk, which encourages people to report when a website is being blocked by their ISP or mobile operator. This week supporters of the group have been highlighting, via social media, just a tiny fraction of the many questionable blocks that have been spotted so far.

Possible Examples of Wrongful Blocks

* http://www.basingstokebells.org.uk

A website that seems to focus on the ringing of church bells in Basingstoke, which is blocked by both BT’s Light and Strict filters for an unknown reason (here).

* http://www.cuanmor.co.uk

A website for a restaurant in Oban, which is blocked by BT’s Light filter and TalkTalk’s Kidsafe filter due to being categorised as “alcohol” (bit harsh to ban a site that doesn’t sell alcohol, it’s just an information page that allows you to book a table).

* http://mattsgardenservices.co.uk

A website that.. well you get the picture from the name. Never the less it’s blocked by Sky Broadband’s filter for being “Pornography”. We don’t know whether that’s due to the fact that naughty plants never seem to stop pollinating with each other or perhaps there was a picture of the odd hoe.

* http://www.vinesmith.com

Granted it’s a website for a vineyard consultancy, but are we really saying that this is a threat to children? Blocked by TalkTalk for “Alcohol“. Perish the thought that the little scamps might get it into their heads to hire a consultancy firm and start their own vineyard. Horrific stuff.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there, just have a little sift through the websites related to Law, Florists and Chess, which are all classed as blocked by one or more providers, and see for yourselves how many of those are warranted or not. Many of those clearly are no risk to young eyes (although a lot obviously are) and a few are downright comical.

We should point out that the blocked.org.uk list isn’t real-time and so it’s likely that some of those listed may have already been removed (certainly they will after this article is posted), but the problem continues. One of the biggest issues is that most of those legitimate sites that do get blocked will never be informed and that could have real repercussions, especially for smaller businesses.

Similarly it’s not uncommon for sites that offer advice or support, such as when trying to recover from things like self-harm or drug addiction, to be automatically blocked. Sadly dumb automation and even humans can be terrible at reading context and so talking about narcotics or self-harm, even in a safe way, is often just as likely to get your site censored as a site that directly promotes violence or nudity.

The news about overzealous filtering might not be quite so frequent today, but the underlying problem hasn’t gone away. Meanwhile it remains easy to circumvent such filtering systems and indeed children often know best how to do that.