3g Mobiles Pose New Porn Threat, Says Aba
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 19, 2003
New-generation mobile phones that provide internet-like content should be heavily regulated to prevent children accessing pornography, a government inquiry was told yesterday .
The Australian Broadcasting Association chairman, David Flint, predicted third generation (3G) phones ``will take off here and will be very big", but the content available on them will be almost impossible for parents to monitor.
``We could soon have children wandering around with mobiles, escaping all parental supervision," he said.
While the golden rule for parents monitoring children's access to the internet was to put the computer in a shared family room, Mr Flint said that would be impossible with a mobile device.
A parliamentary joint committee, set up to investigate issues of cybercrime including child pornography, fraud and identity theft, met in Sydney yesterday to question the content regulator on the effectiveness of the existing regime.
In the three years since the association has been regulating internet content, 1900 complaints had been received, and just over a third had resulted in the location of child pornography. But of the 805 items of child pornography or pedophilia, 80 per cent were based overseas.
Following reports last week of a 12-year-old British girl who ran away with a 31-year-old ex-marine she got to know in an internet chat room, questions were also asked about whether chat rooms and even email could be monitored.
One suggestion was that police could pose as children, to trap adults using chat rooms to ``groom" minors for real meetings.
The renewed concerns over children's access to an increasing volume of undesirable content on the internet and related technologies come as the Department of Education starts the official roll-out of free internet and email accounts for all school students and teachers.
Starting with the new school term on Monday, the department will spend roughly 18 months setting up an estimated 1.3 million school internet accounts. Students will also be able to access the accounts from their homes.
The department said all accounts would have filtering of website content, based on the ages of students and necessary content of the curriculum, and all email will be filtered to remove spam.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald
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