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WirelessDevNet.com Press Release
Children Two Clicks From Adult Mobile Internet
Children are just two clicks away from viewing, pornography, adult chatrooms and gambling websites on internet capable mobile phones this Christmas.
With thousands of teenagers and parents spending their Christmas money on the latest pay as you go web-enabled mobiles, phone operators are not blocking content classified as 18 on many phones available on the high street.
Mobile phone operators claim that access controls only make adult content available after customers have verified they are 18 or over, but some operators are selling phones with access to everything on the web.
Although operators including T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone and Orange have signed up to an industry code of practice for the self-regulation of new forms of content on mobiles, children are still able to purchase a web-enabled handset without content-filter no questions asked.
To highlight the problem, under supervised conditions, web-filtering experts Blue Coat (www.bluecoat.com) sent a 16-year-old boy into a high street shop of a mobile phone operator to see if he could buy a handset.
The 16-year-old paid cash for the pay as you go mobile without any form of identification and walked out being able to surf the internet for porn, use chatrooms, buy knives or alcohol, without being asked for ID or offered a content filtered phone.
In an independent survey of leading mobile operators in the UK, Blue Coat discovered that the only phone company that has default content filters on its mobiles and checks the age of customers is Vodafone.
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