The Changing Face of the Internet

Mobile technology is incredibly popular with children and young people – one only has to look at the boom in text messaging to recognise the importance of children to the mobile phone market. While there are clearly tremendous opportunities for young people with mobile phones, such as the ability to access information and communicate on the move, the advent of the 3rd generation (i.e. Internet-enabled) mobile devices brings new capabilities and applications including web access, video streaming, chat and IM, as well as cameras. This raises very real issues about supervising children and ensuring that children are safe in the areas of accessing content and inappropriate contact as well as being more vulnerable to excessive commercial intrusion and loss of privacy.

Although the potential dangers of children accessing Internet services on mobile devices remain the same as fixed line Internet the nature of the mobile may take these dangers into a new dimension. For example, the private and personal nature of the mobile not only make parental supervision of Internet access more difficult, but as mobile phones are ‘always on’ children are always reachable, and thus potentially easier to locate geographically by predators.

On this page you can link to the proceedings of Childnet’s groundbreaking international conference which we held in March 2003 in Japan with the Japanese Internet Association.

You can also read about Childnet’s responses to the UK Mobile Operator’s code of practice (119KB) and download a presentation (2.3MB) Childnet made to Mobile operators on their corporate social responsibility at the recent GSM association congress in Cannes in February 2004.