The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives last Wednesday, aims to cut down on pedophiles’ access to social networking sites and the children who often populate them; however, the act could potentially ban the kids its seeks to protect from accessing sites like MySpace.com—even Amazon.com—while at libraries or schools, BBC News reports.Source: CIO
DOPA? Great name. While I am all for cutting down on pedophiles’ access to social networking sites, this is not the solution. From Internetnews.com:
...The dopes, in this case, are lawmakers anxious to show the voters back home they are doing something about the sexual predators crawling around the Internet...I would also like to point out how under-funded many schools and libraries are as it is, without mandating broad-stroke banning of Web sites. Conversely, many of these institutions already employ such firewalls to block questionable content.The American Library Association's (ALA) analysis of DOPA concludes the dragnet filters would cover non-educational social networks, chat rooms, wikis, instant messaging, blogs and possibly even e-mail.
The big problem I see here is the government blocking even more sites that are legitimately used for research -- you know, education?
Comments (1)
Yeah... just think of all those pedophiles on wikipedia! why, they even have their own entry! preposterous!
Posted by LKM | August 7, 2006 9:15 AM
Posted on August 7, 2006 09:15