Auckland Council statement on library WiFi use
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09/07/2015. 16:31
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There has been media coverage today about people being able to view objectionable material through Auckland Council’s free WiFi service at Auckland Libraries.
Any user of our WiFi services must accept our terms and conditions, which is asked for whenever a user accesses the WiFi. One of these conditions is that they will not use the WiFi to view objectionable material.
Please see the full statement below, attributed to Darryl Soljan, Manager Customer Experience, North and West Libraries:
Users of Auckland Libraries' free Wi-Fi agree to our terms and conditions prior to using the service for the first time. One of the terms and conditions is that they will not use the free Wi-Fi to view objectionable material.
At Auckland Libraries we take our duty to protect the public from objectionable material very seriously. Devonport Library operates under the same policies and guidelines as the rest of the Auckland public library network to comply with the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act. This Act includes material viewable over the internet.
Under this Act, a publication is objectionable if it describes, depicts, expresses, or otherwise deals with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty, or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good.
In line with industry best practice, our blocking and filtering software is regularly updated to protect the public from objectionable material. As with all such software globally, nothing is 100 per cent fool proof. There are times when we are contacted by our staff or the public to unblock a site that may contain a word or a tag that means a perfectly benign and acceptable website has been blocked by the software.
Conversely, on occasions when the filter has not detected a cleverly disguised site that contains objectionable material and we have been advised by public or staff, we manually add that site to those to be blocked.
Library staff will intervene if they notice objectionable content being viewed, or if customers alert them to such use.
If you go to a search engine and use specific search parameters, images of objectionable material may be seen on the search engine's website. However, should you click on those images in order to go to the respective website, our web filtering would attempt to enforce compliance with the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act.
Because these images are viewed on the search engine website, the only way to prevent any situation involving objectionable material would be to blacklist the search engine entirely. This would largely prevent access to the internet and disadvantage a huge number of our customers and contravene the New Zealand Bill of Rights, Paragraph 14, Freedom of expression: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”
Auckland Libraries’ free WiFi platform is part of the same AucklandOn platform (with the same Terms and Conditions) which the council provides at various hotspots around Auckland.
