Interestingly, the software packages were much better at blocking porn sites that resulted from the pornographic-term searches (89 percent) than they were at blocking the few pornographic sites that turned up when health-related search terms were entered (62 percent).
Certain health search terms resulted in much more blocking -- even at the least-restrictive settings, about 10 percent of health sites turned up by searches using the terms "safe sex", "condom", and "gay" were blocked.
The percent of sites from those terms blocked at moderately restrictive settings was even higher, and at the most restrictive blocking setting, several of the more controversial search terms had blocking rates above 40 percent.
When the researchers turned their attention to a list of 586 health sites that had been recommended for teens by the Yahoo! and Google directories, they found that an average of 0.5 percent were blocked at the least-restrictive filter settings, 2.5 percent were blocked at the moderately restrictive setting, and 23 percent were blocked at the most restrictive setting.
In all, the authors report, setting filtering software to block only pornography will not necessarily have a serious impact on access to general health information, but more-restrictive settings may indeed have an impact. And even pornography-only restriction settings may bar computer users from seeing information on sexual health.
The researchers recommend that software manufacturers devote further research to improving their products' ability to discriminate between pornography and sexual health sites.
They also advocate the adoption of an appeals process by which an Internet site owner can ask that a site be allowed through a filter that blocks it.
Says Richardson, "The Internet makes a big difference in access to health information, and in the future it wil
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Contact: Kara Gavin
kegavin@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
10-Dec-2002