Security News > 2020 > April > Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake'
Cloudflare, known for free speech advocacy, rolled out a self-styled family-friendly variation of its DNS service to block adult content - and ended up denying access to LGBTQ websites and sex education resources.
Cloudflare's initial filter configuration for adult content prevented users from visiting useful and crucial online resources including Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, Outright, Mermaids, Broken Rainbow, Transgender Law Center, Lambda Legal, and various sex education sites.
Via Twitter DM, Lewis acknowledged that content filtering can be difficult but said Cloudflare should have understood what its service would block before launching it.
"Perhaps one of the hardest systems problems that exists in internet tech. That being said, filtering content intended to support queer youth is something that practically every naive filtering product has done since they were first invented. It's a known issue and the fact that no one at Cloudflare tried to access any resource site prior to launching reveals systemic issues that can't be fixed by whitelisting individual sites."
Lewis contends Cloudflare should take its content blocking service offline until the biz can demonstrate that it can filter without doing harm.