UK ISPs blocking legal web pages in effort to protect children: study

UK ISPs were blocking perfectly legal web pages in an attempt to protect children from the internet, according to a study, IT Pro reported.

Almost one in five websites were getting blocked in a bid to keep children from accessing adult content. In some cases, the blocked sites did not feature any illegal content and had no reason to be kept from the public.

According to the Open Right Group (ORG), 19,000 out of 100,000 sites tested by it were blocked by at least one ISP. ORG's discovery of the trend came as part of the ''Blocked'' project – a scheme that tried to help out sites that had been wrongly filtered.

The blocked content found by ORG included an article on postnatal care, a feminist rights blog and also a salesman's sportscar website.

ORG said given the wide variety of normal sites blocked the ISPs were ''not consistent in protecting children.''

The study found that TalkTalk was the most likely to block a website, as it filtered 13,126 pages, with BT taking the second place with 5,229 pages blocked. Plusnet was the least likely to block content, blocking 2 out of the 100,000 tested.

Meanwhile, the group has created a page where individuals could check to see whether a filter was blocking a specific site. The group was highlighting the number of websites ISP filters were affecting, Venture Beat reported.

According to Jim Killock, executive director of ORG, through the Blocked project the group wanted to find out the impact of web filters. He said, already, the group's reports were showing that almost 1 in 5 websites tested were blocked and that the problem of overblocking seemed much bigger than it thought.

Website owners could earlier only assume they were being filtered from lower page visits, Forbes said. The Open Rights Group page would make it easier for individuals to determine just how much control ISPs had over their online content.

People were now turning to ''Blocked,'' but, according to ORG, different filters had different levels of security. According to its website, even if the ''Blocked'' tool detected that a URL was not blocked on an ISP, this might not be the case on other networks. As ''Blocked'' only checked the ''default'' level of ISP filters, and it could not check filters on private networks.

ORG hopes to create a test that would include stricter filters in the future.