Test on Filter Touted at Hearing Finds it Wanting

Staff -- Library Journal, 3/8/1999

At the Senate hearing on filtering legislation Thursday (see story above), Adrian Russell-Falla, whose company produces the filter product WebChaperone, declared rival filters (based on key words or lists of inappropriate sites) wanting, because they can't keep up with the exponential growth of the Internet. He said that his product works by scanning each incoming web page and analyzing it for inappropriate content. Also, WebChaperone rates sites at three levels of content -- teen, pre-teen, and child. So LJ decided to download WebChaperone and put it through a test.

When the question "Am I gay?" was typed into a search engine twice, WebChaperone blocked all results. For the teen category, the blocking messages were "This page will take two to six years to load" and "Let's put it this way: No." For the pre-teen category, the blocking message twice was "Yeeew! What's that smell?" For the child category, the blocking messages were "I'm not going in there! It's too scary!" and "Ooops! This isn't a page for kids." The question "Is masturbation OK?" was similarly blocked at all three levels, with the teen blocking messages rather eerie: "Stay right where you are. We've called the police. Just kidding." and "Your parents don't want you to go here. Someday you'll thank them." Also blocked for teens were sexual health questions, from the Go Ask Alice web site. On the teen setting, the filter also blocked David Burt's posting (in the Web4Lib archive) announcing his report on pornography at libraries (see below).