It's Optenet's business to find porn and, apparently, they're pretty good at it. In a recent press release, the company that offers family-friendly filters for your computer claims that one-third of internet is porn. Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet, says in the release:
“When you consider that more than one third of the Internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting Websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”
"Home PC security"? Was that a subtle reference to Homeland Security? We don't know, but according to Optenet we're all in danger. Their study, which looked at "a database of hundreds of millions of URLs," churned out these stats:
-Pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet -Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212% -Websites that contain violence have increased by 10.8% -Websites that contain terrorism content have increased by 8.5% -Websites that contain illegal drugs purchase have increased by 6.8%
An excellent point made on the blog Geeks Are Sexy, which broke the story: if these numbers only reflect the total number of sites in each category, then an increase doesn't really mean much of anything. If the whole internet is getting bigger, then of course the number of each type of page on the internet is also increasing. One wonders if that huge database also showed an increase in more wholesome websites--for example, corporate pages for porn filtering businesses. Related content: Discoblog: To China’s Internet Filter, Garfield is Pornography, Porn is Not Discoblog: Got Child Porn Stored in Your Xbox? New Forensic Tool Will Find It Discoblog: Bad News for Cyberporn: Internet Sex Linked to Depression, Anxiety
Image: flickr / gcfairch
