Android 5.1.1 Inbuilt Censorship Filters

This whole article was an April's Fool for 1st April 2015.

Android 5.1.1 Inbuilt Censorship Filters

This week a seemingly small, but major update for the hugely popular Android OS will roll out. As smartphones are being increasingly used by minors, Google have taken a drastic step to protect our children from seeing adult content. Using a combination of existing technology, including the new Clean Reader, anything that may be deemed unsuitable for minors is changed. That's right, changed, not blocked.

UK residents already have already seen some ISPs (SKY for example) and mobile network providers (O2, EE, etc.) force customers to prove they are adults if they wish to access adult content. Whereas public Wi-Fi (McDonald's, The Cloud, Tesco, ASDA, etc.) use Adult Filtering by default. Even on these ISPs and mobile networks it has been possible to access some content, as sites are not fully tagging all pages or items. Using a combination of tagging, image recognition, and word filtering, the new Adult Filters in Android 5.1.1 will finally lay at rest parents fears about what their children may see.

So how does this work? Every single thing that is sent, received, or stored in the device is scanned. For text, the offending line is changed using Clean Reader technology while attempting to contain the meaning. "Fuck you" becomes "I do not wish to hear or see you. Please go away, now." With an image, Google's powerful Image Search replaces it with something that contains the non-offending parts of the image. A picture of a couple fucking on a sofa in a lounge gets replaced with a picture of a couple sat on a sofa in lounge.

If you think this all sounds great, but are still worried about your children receiving adult content from children other whilst at school, and sexting, then you didn't read that last paragraph properly. Everything gets filtered, no matter how it is sent or received. Even dodgy selfies being sent via SnapChat are no longer possible.

Powerful stuff, but what about those who are on older Android versions? Luckily Google have released an app that you can download. A link is available to it at the bottom of this article.

Reading this you would expect everyone to be happy, but the biggest complaint so far is from those who do not need the Adult Filters. Why? Because the only way to disable them, is to pay. O2, EE, and other mobile network users may already be familiar with this. They would pay a small one off fee, usually less than £1 and they once again have unrestricted access. This is not how Google are implementing it. If you opt to allow adult content, then the new Adult Filters still track each item, but before sending/receiving them you are presented with a bill that must be paid to continue. Words are charged at 1 pence each and pictures at 25 pence. As you can imagine the cost can quickly mount up.

The only way to avoid having these Adult Filters installed is to disable automatic updates. For details on how to do this click here.

Not on Android 5.1 and want the new Adult Filters? Downloads for older Android devices are available from here, or wait for it to be automatically installed sometime this week.