Living in the world of Josef K.

These words are from the opening of Franz Kafka’s The Trial:

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. … “And why am I under arrest?” he then asked. “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.”

But of course, this being Kafka, K. never does learn about anything, certainly not what he’s accused of. He’s tried, convicted, and brutally executed without ever knowing the nature of his offense.

K.’s nightmare came to mind when I read this entry at Have Coffee Will Write . It’s the story of an encounter with SonicWall, a company that offers web site rating and filtering services. Have Coffee Will Write was categorized #1 Violence/Hate/Racism.

Anybody who’s ever read Have Coffee Will Write or who knows anything about it’s author, Jeff Hess, knows how ridiculous such a categorization is. The post tells about Jeff’s efforts to get his rating changed, which eventually he does. Here’s how he analyzes the situation:

As I noted in my first email, I know that no human is dutifully examining websites, reporting to a committee that then make judicious decisions. No. This is being done by bots and algorithms. And who knows what criteria they’re using.

How many other companies are out there providing these kinds of ratings? How many letters am I going to have to write to get my name cleared? I can’t accept that the burden to correct this injustice rests with the individual.

It seems to me, at a minimum, that any company creating these ratings is obligated to notify everyone it tags with the label it is applying. If such action is not forthcoming, perhaps it would be a good idea to look into a class-action lawsuit?

When this site was blocked from the Knott County Public Library (and I assume most others), the cause seemed relatively straightforward. We’d used forbidden words (reference Lenny Bruce). The fact that the site was released when we put in a few asterisks, which I’m sure would not fool the average 10-year-old, indicates certain flaws in the system. Jeff’s is a much more egregious experience with those flaws.

In a comment, Idyllopus has further information about this phenomenon:

…my findings were that there were some patterns with people on typepad tending to come up as games and people on blogger tending to come up as web communications. Later a Seth Finkelstein came by my site and posted a link to his page on censorware which is very interesting. And he briefly noted in my comments area that “The system is simple. Roughly, all blogs on a service (IP address) will have a default blacklisting. Then individual blogs may have entries which override that default.”

Here is the Idyllopus post. You can read more at Seth Finkelstein’s site here. Follow-up from Jeff with more links here.