In 2000, Congress passed the Child Internet Protection Act, which required filters on computers at libraries and schools that receive federal funds. The portion of the law applying to libraries was struck down in court but an appeal will be heard in the current Supreme Court session.
The U-M and Kaiser researchers performed their study with the help of a specially designed JAVA computer program that conducted Internet searches and stored the results in a database.
The team started with unfiltered searches for 24 health and sexuality terms, and six pornographic terms, using six search engines popular with teens --Yahoo!, Google, America Online (AOL), Microsoft Network (MSN), Ask Jeeves, and Alta Vista.
Some of the health terms were unrelated to sex (for example, diabetes), others involved sexual body parts (such as breast cancer), some were related to sex (for example, birth control), and some controversial health topics (such as abortion).
They then tested whether access to the sites was permitted by seven software packages: N2H2, CyberPatrol, Symantec Web Security, SmartFilter, 8e6, and Websense. All are widely used by schools, libraries, or both. More than 3,000 health and 500 pornography sites were ultimately tested against the filters.
At the least restrictive setting, designed to filter out only pornographic pages, the filter software blocked an average of 1.4 percent of health information sites and about 87 percent of porn sites. At moderate settings, designed to filter pornography, and a few other categories such as nudity and information on drugs and weapons, the filters blocked an average of 5 percent of health sites and 90 percent of porn sites. At the most restrictive settings, which barred a broad range of categories, the blocking of health sites reached an ave
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Contact: Kara Gavin
kegavin@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
10-Dec-2002