5.4: Freedom of Information legislation and information access issues

Table of Contents

1. Freedom of Information legislation
2. Acceptable Use Policies
3. Content filtering
   1. Approaches to content filtering
   2. The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA)
   3. Walled Gardens
   4. Suppliers of filtering software
4. Internet safety with younger clients

Approaches to content filtering

Although a useful tool, Internet filtering systems are not foolproof.

The first method depends on the list of proscribed sites being complete. It would be impossibly expensive for every website on the Internet to be rated using a human observer. There will also be a delay in a new unsuitable site appearing and being added to the list.

The second method suffers from the difficulty of placing keywords into context. An example being, it has difficulty in distinguishing between the names of body parts used in a pornographical or medical context. Another example is that access may be blocked to sites containing innocuous words, one component of which may be of a sexual or profane nature eg Essex. Also, this method checks only for unaccepatble text, not unacceptable images or speech.

A third approach is exemplified by the The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) which can be found at: http://www.icra.org The concept is that website developers should rate their own websites.

Let´s take a look at the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) ...