I'm away from home and have only just caught up on this thread.

Many thanks to Sylvia Else for raising this issue, which demonstrates very well the ludicrous grey areas and inconsistencies that are inherent when the State attempts to dictate what we can and cannot see or publish on the Internet.

G'Day All,
Sylvia
Have you stopped to notice all the signs around schools play groups etc where it says strictly no photograghs to be taken apparently the law is that strict if pushed to the fine print you have apparently got to have a darn good reason to have any form of photography dealing with children.
It is just stupid all round if a child is laughing & happy then isn't it better than having them crying & sad?
I suppose we could ask TPP or any other mum or dad which they would prefer to be with?
As long as the children are safe & happy then that should be all we should be worried about in the first instance.
Thanks have a good life from Dave

The Pied Piper: "Okay so I am thinking the internet needs to be policed at the PC level. Parents control it, filter, block whatever. Do we need the ACMA people to do the classification so that a filter or something will work?"

Since you are new to this discussion, a couple of points:

1. The previous government did have a filtering system in place. The paid some $80M (probably wrong - off the top of my head, but it was a lot) for a licence to filtering software which you installed on your computer. This software was available for free to every Australian. It was promoted heavily for a while. There was stuff all uptake, and of those that did install it, 2/3's stopped using it within 2 months. That scheme has since been abandoned by the current government.

2. There are were two reasons for low uptake. I suspect the predominate one is despite the froth and bubble you see here, no one actually cares. My favourite tactic here was to challenge the noisiest here if they had a filter installed. The answer was invariably no. I presume the noise they made was just for public display.

The second reason is in a highly publicised event, a 12 year old by-passed one of the filters in an hour. The government is saying that won't happen to ISP filtering. That is sadly an out and out lie. (I know it happens all the time, but I am always disappointed when our politicians tell transparent lies.) When it was suggested we should check if a 12 year old can learn from his mate how to by-pass the mandatory filter before spending millions on rolling it out, the suggestion was studiously ignored. The mandatory filter will stop accidental viewing of porn, but have you accidentally seen enough porn to make it worth while spending millions on stopping it?

(cont'd...)

(cont'd...)

3. The reason 66% of people switched off the home filter is because it blocks stuff they want to see. As an example, my neighbour installed a filter. It worked wonderfully at stopping bad web pages. Unfortunately it stopped so many useful ones, she ended up giving the kids the password.

4. Since the proposed mandatory filter will only block sites the ACMA has manually inspected, blocking good pages should not be a huge issue. But there are currently 1,000,000,000,000 unique web pages, with 1,000,000,000 being added every day. I trust you see the problem with the idea of manually inspecting even a small percentage.

5. Finally, you are probably wondering why the filter in point (3) blocked so many good web pages. It is a consequence of point (4). Since it is impossible to manually inspect every web page the filter manufacturers get the computers to rate them. But a computer can't tell the difference between a baby feeding on a boob, and a man (or god help us, a woman) doing other things with it. So they might block say, web pages with a certain percentage of flesh tones, or web pages containing certain words. As a consequence a lot of wheat gets caught with the chaff.

So what does all this mean? It is a long winded version of what I said above. We have an existing scheme for rating books, movies and so on, which relies on manually inspecting every article and jailing publishers who don't toe the line. But we can't inspect the every internet page, and the bulk of we pages come from outside of the country - out of reach of our laws. So imposing the existing scheme on the internet won't work. It is really that simple.

Insisting that "something must be done" doesn't help, because no one has a clue how to bring back the old days. if they did, they would not be pussy footing around with this completely impractical internet filtering idea. It appears the internet has changed the world, and there is no going back.

Dwg,

I don't think the signs about photography have anything much to do with child pornography, but simply privacy.

Generally speaking (I've argued in another forum that there are exceptions in relation to some state property), anyone in control of property can restrict the activities that go on on that property. So if they don't want you to take photographs, and you insist on doing so, they can tell you to leave (but not confiscate nor erase the photographs you've taken!).

It's extremely unlikely that photographs taken of children at a playgroup could constitute child pornography.

There have been reports of people being charged with possession of child pornography as a result of taking photographs of children at the beach or in parks, but I'm not aware of any convictions where people have pleaded not guilty. Most likely, if the person doesn't plead guilty, the charges get dropped. The media are frequently happy to report the laying of charges, but not so interested in their being dropped. For example, as far as I know, despite publishing more than one report about Chris being charged, the Daily Telegraph has yet to mention that the prosecution is not proceeding.

Thank you Mr Stuart I think you just answered every question I was going to ask and some I hadn’t come up with yet. So really we need the ACMA or someone like them to rate something after someone has been arrested? The rest is parental supervision, duty of care etc.

Simple to make use of the internet an over 15 activity unsupervised?

Dave my biggest hassle recently was someone (in a bad mood with me) reporting I had uploaded a photo of a foster child to a site, I hadn’t and suspect the whole issue was used to muddy the waters of another complaint I had put forward.

Since then I have seen video footage of foster children on the web, but it is an NGO still running it and they’re pretty untouchable.

I know parents have been threatened with charges that could lead to two years imprisonment if they put any material that could lead to the identification of a child under custody of DoCS. Leaves the parents unable to access support outside of a lawyers office. Clever aye.

RB... you're kind of annoying. Why don't you go rate everything on the web and get back to us with your results and what you think people should be allowed to see. And it was Fractelle telling you that you may have not understood stuff, I was the one that called you a twat.