BT’s scary child-porn data

British Telecom’s new Net-filtering tool is blocking more than 20,000 attempts to access child pornography a day, Reuters reports. BT said there is no way to tell how many users are going to such sites by accident. The filtering technology, which only blocks illegal child porn sites (not adult content in general), is called “Cleanfeed.” BT uses it for its 2.5 million retail (non-business) customers. Cleanfeed automatically checks requests against a database of thousands of child-porn sites identified by the UK nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF’s real-time database is updated every time an illegal (under the UK’s 1978 Child Protection Act) site is found. BT says it doesn’t attempt to identify the people making the requests or pass such info along to police. Here’s further coverage in ZDNet UK and The Telegraph.