How the Australian Government, in pursuit of safer internet experiences for children, may help sell more Macs: Why filtering software for Windows won't likely help.

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How the Australian Government, in pursuit of safer internet experiences for children, may help sell more Macs: Why filtering software for Windows won't likely help.

Date Created: 26 Jun, 2006, 01:15 AM

Here in Australia, the Federal Government currently in power (and has been for many years now) values conservatism, the war on terror, "family values" and is rather partial to "big business" rather than workers' unions.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that some years ago, under the pressure exerted by a single independent senator whose vote was needed to pass certain bills related to technology, the Government of the day took action involving the internet and censorship.

It set up NetAlert, a Government agency, to advise parents, teachers and internet service providers, about how children can best be protected from the potential for harm from accessing the internet.

Soon after it was set up in 1999, I was approached by one of its employees to write some articles about safety and the internet, which I did. They didn't seem to hit the mark for the individual concerned, and these test articles - for which I received no payment - were not published and the arrangement for me to having a consulting role was never taken up.

In recent months, the conservative social agenda of the current Australian Government has seen it make the offer to Australian parents of free internet filters for their computers in an effort to protect children against internet-borne nasties.

This is neither the place or time to offer a fully thought out opinion as to the success or otherwise of such a generous offer. In all likelihood it would be administered through NetAlert as the responsible agency.

But there are a few concerns I want to share.

There will always be a difficult line to walk between not seeing children harmed and the protection of civil liberties for adults. Sometimes the two seem orthogonal.

But for some time now I have expressed concern that here in Australia, adults are being treated as children, with netnannies in Federal Parliament, and its supportive bureaucracies, deciding what we can and cannot see, read and hear. For the sake of the children of course.

I got a taste of what may be around the corner during last week when I worked with a client in downtown Melbourne. We met in a food mall where the management had generously supplied a free wi-fi connection.

After we had concluded our session (it was to do with being in public), I had an hour to kill before a special meeting of my professional psychological society. So I duly opened up the Powerbook and attempted to log in to get my email.

It did require accessing a homepage and agreeing to its ToS (terms of service), and then I could download my email.

I get morning and afternoon news updates emailed from the Melbourne newspaper of record, The Age, in html, and from there can click on the links to access stories in Camino, my current preferred browser.

One story that took my eye was the one about internet filters for excluding access to pornography, as I've outlined above.

Sitting there in the wide-open food court with its rich supply of wi-fi all around me, ready to update myself with news of clinical interest (I actually haver some experience in marital and sex therapy, even though I have a niche interest in fear of flying and anxiety disorders), this is the message I saw when I tried to log on to the Age's website with the story:

So I encountered a bad regular expression!

Naughty me and Naughty Age newspaper!

"free-online-porn-filters" is the likely suspect, and if I was posing as a journalist I'd probably have emailed the contact person, daniel@fjpcs.com.au to get his side of the story. You can if you want to.

Actually, I should write to the Age webmaster who creates the URL titles and let him or her know that the Age, and its advertisers, are being diddled because of these naughty expressions being censored.

But you know, something interesting occurred since the story was published last week.
The link you see in the image above, while it stills works, has been changed when you search on the Age's own website, to the following:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/free-software-to-trap-internet-nasties/2006/06/21/1150845226730.html

The term "free online porn filters" has been replaced with "free software to trap internet nasties". I wonder if someone actually did feedback to the Age webmaster that the story was being censored if it used that URL?

I wonder if the Daniel@fjpcs.com.au took advice from NetAlert as to the sort of expressions to ban, or used one of the commercial software filters NetAlert advocates.

What will happen when filters are freely given away to parents through the auspices of NetAlert?

It's been a while since I looked at the NetAlert site, but what I see troubles me, as a psychologist, albeit a Mac-owning one.

NetAlert is apparently charted to protect the welfare of Australian families' well-being when it comes to using the internet.

Here is the opening paragraph when you go to its homepage:

"Australia's Internet Safety Advisory Body Practical advice on Internet safety, parental control and filters for the protection of children, students and families.  Discover the risks for children online such as chatting online, cyber bullying, online predators or online scams and find solutions to these problems and more."

Which sounds quite useful, doesn't it?

But the history of applying filters is a vexed one, and some of you might recall AOL's efforts to protect its private subscribers by not letting them view items with the word "breast", thus eliminating those seeking information on breast cancer from accessing health-related sites via AOL. This was as far back as 1995, and was quickly amended when a variety of self-help and other groups protested to AOL management.

Since then, filtering has been continually touted as the internet's moral saviour, and one of the difficult questions has been where to place that filter: with the ISP's servers, or on individual computers, giving the user the choice. At the ISP end, which is been government's preference (since the end-user is likely to be technically challenged, so the story goes), the concern has been not just one of civil liberties, but whether the flow of information will be slowed due to the filtering.

This is already occurring, but with respect to spam rather then sexual content.

Again, to what extent is the community willing to go to protect its children - use free filtering software but at the economic cost of slowing the internet for everyone, and with only limited filtering success?

Getting to read the story, the free filtering software, according to the Age article, is already for sale "for $50" but as part of a $117 million dollar scheme will be made available for free by the end of the year, matched by a $17 million dollar ad campaign, with an extra $5 million to go to NetAlert.

Now, I don't know which filtering software this is, but if you go to the NetAlert homepage, you will find a table of software at different price points, (see below).

As you can see, the only software for the price point discussed in the Age is from an Australian company, Arlington, for $55. And not surpringly, it is only available for various flavours of Windows.

As are the more expensive options, including Norton Security which IS available for the Mac. But there are two issues here. It is over $100 and unlikely to be freely given to Mac owners. And secondly, discussion with various Mac owners suggests to me they wouldn't allow anything with the Norton brand to come near their precious Macs.

Indeed, heading over to the Australian Symantec site produces a confusing information set, since there does seem to be a Mac product, but it's not actually clear that it can be purchased.

So is it too simplistic to suggest that any young person desiring to get a sexual education - or just their jollies - from the Web is now going to ask their parents to get them a Mac?

The smarter ones, running rings around their parents as it is when it comes to things technological, will inform their parents of the Mac's better security out of the box, its better Total Cost of Ownership (the really smart kids), and its lack of malware and viruses making online banking a safer experience. (Frankly, I don't believe this either...)

But of course those male adolescents will have only one thing on their minds for wanting the Mac, won't they?

That Macs will likely not be in able to use the recommended free software is an irony which will not be lost on Mac users when you see the information booklet which can be downloaded from the NetAlert site. It is similar to the advertisements already appearing in newspapers, and which you can see below.

Regular Mac user will recognise the WIMP metaphor being used, and it is definitely a Mac interface, down to the black arrow. It seems to me that advertising agencies use Macs frequently, so even if the product they're selling is Windows-only, it's not uncommon to see Mac hardware or software being used to extol the product's virtues or utility as we see in the case of the NetAlert parental guide, above.

Let's go a little deeper into the site, and see what it advocates. It's one thing to suggest filters are one way to go, albeit with reservations as to their effectiveness and their capacity to slow down data transfer. It's another to advocate actions or offer information which may be contentious or value-laden.

On the main page, one can search for articles via three lists of pull-down menus. One lists "Issues", which you can see pulled down, at right.

Let's look at one which as a psychologist I might be expected to know something of, given my self-described designation of Cyberpsychologist.

Internet Addiction is listed, and following the link brings us to this page, below.

(The cutoff of the header, "What is Internet Addiction Disorder" is how the page appears in Safari).

Now, to my knowledge, there is no such thing as Internet Addiction Disorder. There are many writers claiming it exists, some qualified to make a variety of diagnoses, others not but who nonetheless think nothing of making up all kinds of syndromes and posing them as legal defenses.

Some might now think of the "Twinkie defence" when a former San Francisco city supervisor shot and killed the Mayor and a superintendent in 1978. As it turns out, that defence was never actually used although the consumption of Twinkies was offered up as evidence of the presence of depression in the offender, a previously fitness-oriented individual. (see the Snopes link for background).

On the NetAlert page, we are offered a set of links if we want to find out more. You can follow along by opening up a new, separate page here.

That link takes you to another NetAlert page, which contains the following information:

"There is help available for people suffering from Internet addiction disorder.
If you feel your child is spending too much time on the Internet, discuss the issue with them and create a family Internet safety plan to help monitor and modify this behaviour.
Discussing the problem with teachers and other adults is also a good idea, as it will help you gain an overall view of your children's internet usage.
As well as this, professionals such as clinical psychologists, can help children identity problem behaviours and learn coping skills to deal with them."

Now apart from making Internet Addiction Disorder a real thing, the rest of the advice is really quite appropriate. Although, I would add that:

1. Not all Clinical Psychologists know much about this area of research and practice at all.

2. Not all Clinical Psychologists would focus on the child as having problem behaviours, but prefer to focus on either the parents or the family, and not take a problem-focussed stance.

3. Not all psychologists agree that children viewing sexually-explicit material will become vulnerable to adult-onset disorders.

In this past weekend's Australian newspaper, featuring a story on indigenous Australians' health, pornography was cited as a major part of a chronic epidemic of sexual abuse of children.

A senior member of my profession, Dr. Bob Montgomery, who is also an elected Board member of the Australian Psychological Society (the Society is linked to on NetAlert as a resource for parents) appeared in the Murdoch-owned press, thus:

"Australian Psychological Society spokesman Bob Montgomery says two significant international studies in Britain and the US have concluded "without any doubt that pornography is mostly harmless and should be freely available to adults who want to see it...

Watching porn does not turn people into monsters," Mr Montgomery says. "It increases the desire to go home and make passionate love to your wife or to masturbate, that's all. A lot of people use it, and use it sensibly. And as for whether it's corrupting the young, well, look at the surveys. Almost all the indicators show that young people today are happy, healthy people with attitudes that are remarkably similar to their parents."

Now he may have said a lot more qualifying the quote above, but that's what appeared in the media this past weekend, here.

Further down the NetAlert page we find more links which produce interesting results.

Under the listing of "Pathological Internet Use", a term often used by those not wishing to commit to the term "Disorder", the link takes us to Lenny Holmes' article at the mental health section of About.com.

I've known Lenny for a long time principally through a discussion list for mental health practitioners interested in technology and its impact.

Does Lenny advocate for Internet Addiction Disorder?

Let's read:

"Researchers studying Online behavior have different opinions about the existence of "Internet addiction." In another article I expressed some skepticism regarding this "diagnosis." I doubt that it deserves to be elevated to the status of an official diagnosis. It is undoubtedly true that some people develop severe problems with their Internet use, however.

The DSM-IV and the ICD-9 (the diagnostic manuals used to diagnose mental and substance abuse disorders) may contribute to the problem. They diagnose substance abuse and dependence based on the chemical family that one is addicted to. They do not consider non-chemical disorders to be addictions. The term "pathological gambling" is used rather than "gambling addiction", for example.'

And further on:

"There are people who compulsively chat online, people who compulsively download pornography, and people who compulsively play games. If the word "addiction" is even appropriate, I'd like to suggest that people become "addicted" to these activities and not to the Internet itself. The term "sex addict" is not an official diagnostic term, but it is sometimes used to describe someone someone who is compulsively sexual and seems to be addicted to sex. Many of these people buy hundreds of pornographic magazines and videos. We don't consider them to be addicted to "magazines and videos", but to sex - the content of the magazines and videos."

So, I don't think Lenny is buying into the "disorder" categorisation, but he does reinforce the idea that doing anything compulsively can sometimes get you into trouble.
Another NetAlert link takes us to John Grohol's Psychcentral site, one of the earliest "blog" style psychology sites.

Here, John discusses Internet Addiction, and his opening paragraph is:

"What "Internet addiction disorder" (IAD) (is) is still difficult to define at this time. Much of the original research was based upon the weakest type of research methodology, namely exploratory surveys with no clear hypothesis or rationale backing them. Coming from an atheoretical approach has some benefits, but also is not typically recognized as being a strong way to approach a new disorder. More recent research has expanded upon the original surveys and anecdotal case study reports. However, as I will illustrate below later, even these studies don't support the conclusions the authors claim."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the claim for Internet Addiction Disorder.

In the best circumstances, I'd say that NetAlert is acting in a very even handed way, letting us know that the field is wide-open to interpretation - as long as you actually follow through the links, rather than take the attention-grabbing headers as your primary source of evidence.

Indeed, buried further down in John's 2005 article, one he started years ago and keeps updating, (the last update being a month ago) he states the following:

"I and other professionals have talked about the problems facing the concept of IAD before. We're not saying anything new here. Until there is stronger, more conclusive research in this area, though, you should shy away from anyone looking to treat this problem, since it is a problem that seems to exist more in some professionals' concept of dysfunction than in reality."

Ok, so maybe NetAlert is getting a little carried away with its warnings, and it's not quite the scientifically valid site it could be, but that's really not going to harm anyone is it, compared to the potential for harm committed by adults preying on children in chat rooms or on sites such as the Murdoch-owned MySpace.com?

In fact, while chatrooms are mentioned on the NetAlert website, MySpace is not mentioned by name, even though NetAlert does mention and links to a number of websites which are external to it, such as the Anti-Defamation League, a site committed to rooting out hate crimes, especially those of anti-semitism.

The link is to show a commercial use of filtering software to catch hate speech. Curiously, one of the feature articles on the ADL page concerns itself with MySpace, mentions NewsCorp, its owner, by name, and offers the following by Christopher Wolf,

"a litigation partner at Proskauer Rose LLP, is chairman of the International Network Against Cyber-Hate and the Internet Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League and co-chairman with former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry of a public policy coalition called "Hands Off the Internet:

who writes:

"But some of those cool kids (who have joined MySpace) have used their 15 megabits of fame to post risque pictures and to feature racist, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic content. Some have even used the medium to plot a copycat Columbine attack--a horror that recently was averted because of the safety mechanisms MySpace, a unit of News Corp., has built into its service allowing quick responses to threats of harm.
To deal with the problem generally, MySpace.com appointed a chief security officer and has removed 200,000 profiles deemed "objectionable," hoping to reassure parents and advertisers about the safety of the site. The move is timely, as parents, educators and community leaders are becoming increasingly concerned about kids' use of the service.
Some fear that online predators will target kids who have posted raunchy material. The recent revelation about a high government official allegedly surfing for 14-year-old girls has heightened the concern. Several state attorneys general already are looking into the online service. Even worse, from a business standpoint, MySpace faces a possible loss of advertisers because of objectionable content."

It's clear at the end of the day that, not surprisingly, NetAlert will cater for the largest portion of the population while it does the Government's bidding in facilitating a worthwhile if socially conservative agenda. The hallmark of such an agenda is to keep fear and insecurity high on the population's list of things to worry about.

Not all will agree with its way of doing things. When I rang NetAlert today seeking assistance as a clinical psychologist with a family (not an untrue situation, just not current) worried about a teenage son's web explorations, I was referred surprisingly to a rather left wing Canberra-based thinktank's February 2003 publication when I asked for information. I wanted to explain to the family the potential for harm from viewing netbased sexually explicit materials.

You can see the report I was referred to here, published by The Australian Institute Ltd.

Its summary concluded thus:

"While further research is needed to draw definitive conclusions about the impacts on
children of exposure to pornography, in our view the evidence available provides
grounds for serious concern about exposure of children to particular types of
pornography, notably pornography involving violence and extreme behaviours. More
concerted action to minimise exposure of children is therefore warranted."

At the time of its release the report caused quite a stir, coming as it did from an think tank expected to be liberal in its views of media consumption.

So all in all, NetAlert seems to have its heart in the right place, and is doing a positive service for the community, albeit with some scientific lapses which it ought to correct.

But like many organisations trying to stem the flood of images, text and videos coming to the internet from new sources themselves challenging mainstream media, it faces an uphill battle. Especially with its Windows-centric focus, and advocating of filters and content management focussed on the security-flawed Internet Explorer. Not unexpected of course, but one with potential influence on the choice of computer for the family to purchase. Especially if the family's sons and daughters, choosing to flex their "indepence" muscles, has any say in it.

It goes without saying that education is the bedrock of prevention of harm and the promoting of community safety.

But the overemphasis on technological devices to change community behaviours will not prove helpful in the long run. The cat's out of the bag with so much of the new technologies and it's not going to be stuffed back in very easily or willingly.