Out of the mouths of babes oftime comes porn?
How, a Dallas photographer wants to know, did his family Web site - including snapshots of his nine month old daughter - get classified as porn?
Bill Maselunas had noticed hits on the site from an index at search.thunderstone.com. He went to the Thunderstone site and discovered its automated indexing software had classified as porn - and triple-X, no less.
Apparently, says the Dallas Morning News, little Fiona's cooing and giggling were interpreted as references to porn.
And his isn't the only PG Web site to be rated in the porn category by Thunderstone. After searching Thunderstone, he discovered a small host of non-porn businesses - including a Christian-oriented ISP - hit as smut sites. And, according to the paper, Thunderstone is actually blaming Maselunas for the mistake.
"How can they say that about me - and anybody else - to associate me with pornography," a fuming Maselunas told the News.
He apparently contacted one Ohio attorney who told him it wouldn't be worth it to mount a legal battle, but another attorney tells the paper Thunderstone could well be liable legally for classifying a site wrongly as porn.
He told the paper he contacted Thunderstone to have the site pulled from the index, but the company told him that while mistakes happen, such are "the unavoidable price of progress in Web categorization."
Oddly enough, the owner of the Christian ISP (the International Family Network) says he was actually excited about the mistake. "I figure anybody looking for that kind of thing could use what we're offering," says IFN president Troy LaCoe to the News.
Maselunas isn't exactly counting his own blessings over the mistake, though. "My worst fear," he told the paper, "is that somebody is looking at my site, trying to get porn, and immediately sees a picture of a little girl. I don't know how sick people get, but that's scary."
And the News also says Thunderstone's director "bristled" when the Cleveland-based Web site was contacted about Maselunas's complaint. "That guy is kind of crazy," Bart Richards told the paper. "I don't understand his motivation. It's a terrible idea, putting pictures of your children on the Internet…My God, he was asking for it."
Maselunas, though, was told by Thunderstone that getting the online forms to reclassify his site could take several weeks before they go through. "They say, 'Tough - my robot did it. Fix it yourself'," he fumed to the News, adding he was blocked from accessing the site after he fired off e-mails alerting Thunderstone owners of other mislabeled sites with copies to Thunderstone.
Part of the problem stems from Thunderstone's automating a category process which is usually done by humans at such subject-sorted sites as Yahoo! They also place Web pages into categories based on analyses of the page's text and layout.
In other words, says the News, someone searching "real estate" would find not just sites featuring the term in text but the person would also be linked to pages classified as related to real estate , based on their references to "acreage, home sales," and other terms on that type of site.
And, references to pictures and girls can get a site landed into one of a host of X-rated groupings.
Thunderstone insists it's just too big a job to have humans review computer work and defeat its automation goals. But Internet law expert Stephen Gillen says that won't exactly let them off the hook in a case like this.
"I think there is a theoretical cause of action for libel or a false-light invasion of privacy," the Cincinnati-based attorney tells the News, "but establishing that there were any real damages would be tough."
An attempt to visit the Maselunas Web site brought this result, in simple black type on a white background: "Due to recent events, our website is temporarily unavailable. Family and friends, you will be notified as to where to find our new and updated site. Apologies."
