I was reading about some of the fuzzy statistics that relate to the current attempts to filter/censor the ‘internet’ and I couldn’t help but wonder how effective it will be. Many other people have pointed out just how hard it would be, but I’m basically a numbers person, for all that I now like qualitatively styled research. I should mention that I’ve lost most of the links to the posts where others have pointed out how hard it will be to filter. But, after reading the statistics that Irene at libertus.net gathered, I couldn’t help reorganising some of those numbers.
According to the IWF’s (Internet Watch Foundation (UK)) annual report, there were some 10,656 URLs in 2006 that contained potentially illegal child sexual abuse material, so let’s just round that to 10,000, oh heck, let’s round it up to 100,000, because (*sarcasm alert*) we know there is more out there than we could ever imagine[1]! So we have this nice round figure of one hundred thousand (100,000)[2] URLs that potentially contain material that could be banned under a proposed clean feed.
Now, Googleblog tells us that there are some 1,000,000,000,000 URLs[3] in their database and they haven’t logged them all yet. So that makes, even with my gross overestimation of the problem, a one in ten million chance of inadvertently stumbling onto some potentially illegal material. That’s 0.0000001% of all URLs may NEED to be blocked by the filter because they are allegedly hosting allegedly illegal material.
Given that the estimate of the false positives is around 1.3 – 7.8%, which doesn’t seem all that much until you realised that it is between 13,000,000,000 and 77,000,000,000 URLs. If we apply these kinds of success/failure rates to something like drug trials[4], we have a one in ten million chance of curing the disease and, at the lowest level, more than 1 in one hundred chance of killing the patient[5], at worst, or creating other problems. So, to restate it rather bluntly, in order to cure one person in ten million (prevent accidental viewing of a website[6] ), you may have to kill (block access to) one person (website) in a hundred. Hardly a good outcome and not one that would be condoned by any thinking individual. And there’s the point!
- although why people always imagine the worst, I’ll never know – oh yeah, The Iceberg Conjecture! [↩]
- Okay, it’s made up, but based on a modicum of reality and, after all, it’s only the tip of that iceberg [↩]
- they call it a trillion, I’d call it a billion because it’s a million million, because that’s how we think in Aus, or it will be until the monoculturisation is complete! – That sarcasm alert? Still in force! [↩]
- which may be blocked under the filter because drugs are bad, mkay? [↩]
- let’s not contemplate the upper limit here [↩]
- teh pr0n, it will keel you! [↩]
Tags:
censorship, nocleanfeed, stupidity