Federal study claims one percent of Web files are porn

From USA Today and news.com: Accord­ing to a Fed­eral study, approx­i­mately 1% of files listed on Google and Microsoft search engines are pornographic.The study was com­mis­sion by Fed­eral lawyers to sup­port the 1998 Child Online Pro­tec­tion Act. COPA required web sites to col­lect a credit card num­ber before allow­ing a user to view adult mate­ri­als. The law was over­turned by the Supreme Court in 1998. A 2000 law that required libraries and schools to install and use Web fil­ters was upheld by the Court in 2003. An ear­lier 1996 law that banned online pornog­ra­phy was over­turned by the court in 1997, in part because the law employed a broad def­i­n­i­tion of porn.

The Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU) sup­ports fil­ters, claim­ing that highly restric­tive fil­ters can block a major­ity of adult web sites. How­ever, many porn sites are oper­ated out­side the United States, and porn sites tend to use pop­u­lar non-pornographic key­words in attempts to direct new users to the sites.

Tagged as: ACLU, adult, crime, data, Federal, Google, law, Microsoft, search, USA