The UK Conservative government is pressing on with their insane plan to block all adult sites (including ones that are legal for adults to access) for all UK internet users.
Not only will this fail to keep kids from looking at pornography (the stated purpose of the bill), it will also force the millions of British adults who engage in the totally lawful conduct of looking at adult-oriented material in the privacy of their own homes to take evasive action.
Finally, the radical expansion of the UK’s already opaque national censoring firewall to include all adult sites will mean that millions of websites will be blocked according to secret criteria and through a secret blacklist. Even assuming that no one abuses this situation to secretly block the things they don’t like, a very small false positive/overblocking rate, even 1%, would mean that thousands of legitimate sites would be blocked.
The Open Rights Group is collecting signatures to give to MPs about this. I’ve signed up. I hope you will.
In the Digital Economy Bill, the Government wants erotica and pornography websites to make sure their users are over 18. This could threaten our privacy by collecting data on everyone in the UK who visits erotica and pornography sites. Making sure all porn sites go along with it is unworkable. So a group of MPs want Internet Service Providers to block websites that don’t comply. Sign our petition to say no to censorship of legal content.
MPs are putting pressure on the Government to add measures to the Bill that would force Internet Service Providers to block erotica and pornography websites that don’t verify the age of their users.This equates to censorship of legal content – potentially affecting tens of thousands of websites and millions of people.
Blocking websites is a disproportionate, technical response to a complex, social issue. The UK’s children need education, not censorship, to keep them safe.
Stop UK censorship of legal content
[Open Rights Group]