The BBC reports a claimed steep rise in attempts to access child pornography in the UK
The number of attempts to view illegal child pornography on the web has risen sharply since 2004, according to BT.
The company uses a system to block sites carrying indecent images of children, which has been thwarting 35,000 hits a day for four months.
When BT first began using the Cleanfeed system 18 months ago, there were 10,000 attempted hits every day.
Children’s groups have repeated calls for all internet service providers to prevent access to illegal websites.
The Cleanfeed blocking technology, provided by a separate company, forbids access to sites blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors illegal activity on the web.
Obviously, child porn is a major concern. But I do wonder about the way that this story is being reported. “35000 hits per day” sounds like there are 35000 paedophiles out there looking for porn each day, but every blogger who is concerned about their visitor stats (and aren’t we all?) knows that there is a big difference between ‘hits’ and ‘visitors’. I’m sure BT knows the difference too.
Which raises the question: why use the larger number? I’m not so cynical that I would suggest that these webstats are being used to artificially raise public fear, still less to boost sales of their Cleanfeed system. They wouldn’t do that, would they?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Olive Morgan 02.07.06 at 5:44 pm
Last week, for the first time since I began blogging, a pornographic advert had got into Modblog’s ‘Random’ search box where you can look for new contacts. I found that it was the first thing that came uo each time and I have not clicked on ‘Random’ since I discovered this. Modblog has been used mainly by the younger bloggers before Modblog’s recent difficulties and had a large number clicking on ‘Random’. This may partly answer your question. I certainly hope it’s not as you feared!!!
malc 02.08.06 at 2:47 pm
they use the larger number, because they’re not allowed to trace to see who is doing the searching. So it could be one person, using an automatic bot to do the searching, or there could be 10,000 people doing three searches…. or 35,000 people……
So because they don’t know (you’re not allowed to see with out a court order) they simply report the number that they have.
Richard 02.08.06 at 3:41 pm
They’ll have more idea than they’re letting on, Malc. If my stats at connexions are anything to go on, the hit count will be much lower than the visitor number, by as much as a factor of 10 or more. At the very least, they’ll know how many different IP addresses those hits come from. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that BT were talking this up for some reason.