Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake'
- Reference: 1585769462
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/01/cloudflare_familyfriendly_dns_service_flubs/
- Source link:
Introduced on Wednesday, the service is called [1]1.1.1.1 for Families . It can be used by home internet users to block malware and prevent children from seeing adult content. Parents can configure their devices or gateways to use the DNS resolver 1.1.1.2 for protection from malware-serving websites, or 1.1.1.3 for malware and adult content protection.
Browsers and other apps use DNS resolvers to turn domain names like theregister.co.uk into network addresses they can connect to. Thus, Cloudflare's filtered DNS can refuse to look up domain names considered off-limits or dangerous, preventing users, such as children, from seeing bad stuff. That's the theory.
Cloudflare's initial filter configuration for adult content, however, prevented users from visiting useful and crucial online resources including Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, Outright, Mermaids, Broken Rainbow, Transgender Law Center, Lambda Legal, and various sex education sites.
Via Twitter, Sarah Jamie Lewis, executive director of [2]Open Privacy Research Society , an advocacy group based in Vancouver, Canada, slammed Cloudflare for its inept site blocking.
"You would think that an organization like @Cloudflare that spent weeks and agonizing over a decision to [3]block literal nazis from its platform (and then minutes deciding to throw sex workers under the bus) would be more considerate when getting into the censorship game," she [4]said .
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince promptly responded, [5]saying , "Dumb mistake on our part and we are fixing it immediately."
Lewis said some but not all of the sites she identified have been unblocked.
In an email to The Register , Prince said as much. "It was a horrible mistake and we are working to remedy it as quickly as possible," he said. "We use a variety of external categorization services to categorize the internet. Our intention was to do something similar to 'Google Safe Search' and there were some categories that were included in Adult Themes by one provider that we missed when we did our review."
Cloudflare is over the moon because its pro-privacy 1.1.1.1 DNS service got a clean bill of health from everyone's favorite auditor – KPMG [6]READ MORE
The company said that 1.1.1.1 for Families uses the same site filtering and categorization technology as its [7]Gateway corporate firewall.
"We use multiple external sources that we combine together to ensure we have good coverage of the internet," a company spokesperson explained in an email to The Register . "The list of providers is constantly being reviewed and checked against each other for errors. In the future, we plan to offer the ability for users to select more granular and additional categories that will only apply to them."
Via Twitter DM, Lewis acknowledged that content filtering can be difficult but said Cloudflare should have understood what its service would block before launching it.
"Content filtering is a very hard problem," she said. "Perhaps one of the hardest systems problems that exists in internet tech. That being said, filtering content intended to support queer youth is something that practically every naive filtering product has done since they were first invented. It's a known issue and the fact that no one at Cloudflare tried to access any resource site prior to launching (or did and didn't see it as an issue) reveals systemic issues that can't be fixed by whitelisting individual sites."
What makes the misstep particularly galling for Lewis is Cloudflare has been so vocal in the past about the dangers of censorship. As Prince [8]wrote in 2011, "Cloudflare is firm in our belief that our role is not that of Internet censor."
"That this 'mistake' exists at all reveals a systemic issue at Cloudflare that has the potential to kill queer youth – millions of which attempt suicide every year – and the reason why these sites exist in the first place," Lewis observed. "You don't get to brand yourselves as neutral third parties and then turn around and enact policies that explicitly target such a marginalized population."
Lewis contends Cloudflare should take its content blocking service offline until the biz can demonstrate that it can filter without doing harm. ®
Full disclosure: The Register is a Cloudflare customer.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families/
[2] https://openprivacy.ca/
[3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_daily_stormer/
[4] https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1245377785914220544?s=20
[5] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1245380316270714880?s=20
[6] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/31/cloudflare_dns/
[7] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-for-teams/
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20171125011140/https://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/
Re: So?
Fuck off. Fuck off. Then fuck off some more.
Re: So?
If anyone thinks that's too rude, have a look at the suicide rate for young trans people.
Clue: it's not because there are people telling them that life could be different.
And the problem is?
Families with young children may prefer to tackle such subjects themselves, rather let the children stumble across god knows what dodgy websites.
"may prefer to tackle such subjects themselves"
I feel sorry for children who have questions and fears, and are forbidden from finding resources themselves that could help them understand who they really are.
Anyway, that's beside the point. The filter is supposed to block malware and porn, not human-rights campaigners. That's presumably the mistake Cloudflare's referring to.
C.
Re: And the problem is?
Ideally you'd decide the filter yourself instead of trusting someone else with it. As that is obviously too much work it would be nice if you could have a menu where you disable certain buckets.
For instance, I would not block nudity but I would block violence, religion and pro-suicide sites.
That solves the values problem, though it doesn't solve the problem that someone has had to decide site X or Y goes into a certain bucket which involves their judgement, not yours.
What provider?
"there were some categories that were included in Adult Themes by one provider that we missed when we did our review."
So which provider was it? What other sites does it classify as inappropriate for children? If it's blocking LGBTQ, is it also blocking child abuse and reproductive health? How about other right-wing bugaboos like climate change or Islam? And who else uses this provider?
American definition of family friendly
Why does the American definition of family friendly always mean far right? As if normal people don't have families.
I am far more worried about my children seeing violence than sex. They can see naked people all day as far as I care, rather unclothed people than people being shot, strangled, raped, decapitated or hanged. This is the same cesspit of values where Facebook got its policies from where it's fine to post videos of women being decapitated as long as you don't see their nipple during the murder.
Because a child watches 1500 murders before he's
Twelve years old and we wonder why we've created
A Jason generation that learns to laugh
Rather than to abhor the horror
Are there family friendly filters that block violence instead of naked people?
Definitely dumb mistake
As Lewis also pointed out on the Twitter thread that the article links to, an example of sites that they DON'T block: stormfront dot org.
They're not censoring the bloody Internet. People are *choosing* to use their DNS filtering service. There's a big difference. It can be removed just as easily as it was put in place. It's a filtering service, it filtered stuff. Others providers like openDNS are available and you can even choose to not block specific sites if you want to.
Presumably it also does it for free?
Fully customisable commercial web filters such as Forcepoint cost considerably more than most families would be willing to pay.
Frankly, sadly, changing a home router's DHCP server to hand out a different DNS server address is going to be well beyond what most parents are capable of. That's if the router even allows that kind of config change. And mobile devices operating on a cellular data connection, or devices that might operate from WiFi outside the home are another problem.
I suspect a significant chunk of parents have no idea how to go about restricting what their kids can access. Especially given the amount of material that they might want to block that sits on multi-interest platforms like Twitter - which apparently has a ton of porn on it, but also loads of musicians, actors etc. that kids would want to get content from.
Perhaps Cloudflare's first mistake was getting involved in a business which they've so vocally been against in the past. Namely, censorship. Yes, this is just DNS and it's optional, but at the end of the day they are still providing a service which selectively blocks websites based on a third-party list.
If they want to be truly anti-censorship, they should leave this up to other providers. Otherwise they're trying to have a strong neutral opinion on a topic that they're providing a service for, which is rather counter-intuitive. It's difficult to claim one thing and then offer a service which would be mostly of interest to people who disagree with you. Slight conflict of interest there.
So?
So what's wrong with keeping children away from trans-activist sites? Or any other body dysmorphia activist sites such as pro-anorexia sites?