Mobile Operators teaming up against child abuse
By Ben Robinson on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 5:49 AM PST In Announcements, GSMA, Partnerships, Security
MNOs across Europe are teaming up in the battle against child pornography being disributed via the mobile internet. The GSMA is launching the (not particularly snappily-named) “Mobile Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Content” – which is made up of most of the major OpCo groups.
The group will use certain procedures to remove content from their networks, and also block access to websites containing inappropriate media. Whilst the group pointed out that the vast majority of content is consumed via conventional connections, with the advent of “mobile broadband” (in all it’s guises), measures need to be in place to deal with a potentially growing issue.
Comment: I think this is a great step in the war against this kind of sick material – and timely given a recent story I read about child abusers moving toward carrying their material around on their mobiles to avoid detection. Whatever can be done to avert this terrible abuse, and subsequent distribution of material, has my full backing.
[Via: The Register]
Not talking about this particular initiative, but whenever I hear a non-related political or business party taking initiative against child sexual abuse, I have learned to hear the alarm bells. The monitoring/censorship system ends up too easily being used for something completely different (wider censorship or surveillance), while being extremely ineffective for the actual thing (preventing child abuse).
For example, Finland has just implemented a censorship list for child porn, but already now, lots of other websites have ended up being blocked – including a small site who righteously criticized the system and the secret blacklist:
http://www.ecyrd.com/ButtUgly/wiki/Main_blogentry_130208_1
It’s a slippery slope. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?