According to admittedly conservative reports released by British Telecom, at least 35,000 attempts to access child pornography are blocked each day in Britain. While already somewhat shocking, BT warned that the actual figures could be much higher.
BT, which provides home internet access to one-third of British users, said attempts to bypass its filters by its three million customers have tripled in the past 18 months. The company's Cleanfeed program prevents access to sites blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in compliance with the 1978 Child Protection Act.
When the technology was introduced in 2004, around 10,000 attempts per day were blocked, a relatively low number by comparison. In the last four months there have been four million access attempts alone.
IWF operations manager Frank Glenn agreed that the numbers were troublesome, but pointed out that many of the logged attempts could be unsolicited in the form of popups or spam emails.
While the Cleanfeed system blocks access to blacklisted sites, it does not record any information about the user. The numbers from BT do not reflect the other two-thirds of the home market receiving access from other providers.
News source: Guardian Unlimited Technology
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