QuickLinks - Protection of minors

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Issue no. 194 - 23 April 2001

• Yahoo! UK recruits paedophile 'inspector' (Yahoo UK)
  Internet portal Yahoo! UK has recruited an "inspector" charged with responsibility for dealing with paedophile content polluting its chatrooms. As the first content inspector ever to be recruited by the portal, her job will be to deal with the unacceptable use of chatrooms by paedophiles to lure children into offline sexual meetings.

Issue no. 193 - 3 April 2001

• Anti-porn crusaders hide behind our kids (Wired)
  The Children's Internet Protection Act is nothing more than the latest offensive in the moralistic jihad against pornography (Brock N. Meeks) see also Filters don't censor, they protect our kids. Foes of Internet filter law don't understand the dangers of online porn (Donna Rice Hughes).

Issue no. 192 - 26 March 2001

• Why the Net is not child-safe (Times - John Carr)
  Millions of children are signing up to the World Wide Web but the Internet service providers who connect them take little interest in who is online. Should they not be more responsible?

• Fox Kids sees market niche (FT)
  Fox Kids Europe, the children's broadcaster backed by Rupert Murdoch, is to sell market research about its young customers to WPP, the world's largest advertising company. Children visiting the Fox Kids' websites will be questioned about their attitudes, tastes and behaviour - to help advertisers and brand managers understand the valuable youth market.

Issue no. 190 - 12 March 2001

• Yahoo! shows tougher line on piracy than child porn (ZDNet UK)
  Internet piracy is given a higher priority, by Yahoo!, than protecting children online, it emerges this week, as the Internet portal removes 13 chatrooms found to be trading encryption techniques, whilst ignoring hundreds of paedophile groups that it was alerted to six months ago.

• EU - Children and young people in the new media landscape (Swedish Presidency)
  Presidency report, conclusions and speeches from the expert meeting.

Issue no. 189 - 5 March 2001

• EU - Commission calls for increased efforts to protect minors (RAPID)
  The Commission has adopted its Evaluation Report (PDF) to the Council and the European Parliament on the application of Council Recommendation of 24 September 1998 on protection of minors and human dignity in audiovisual services and new media. The report analyses the measures adopted in the Member States and at Community level over the past two years. It notes that the Recommendation has been implemented in a satisfactory manner overall, but regrets that consumers have not been sufficiently involved in the introduction of codes of conduct. see also EC Calls For Protection For Minors Against New Media (Newsbytes) and Regulating Audiovisual Content in the Digital Age (Power point presentation).

Issue no. 187 - 17 February 2001

• Fighting gaming violence in Japan (MSNBC)
  Over the last few years there has been an increase in teen violence in Japan, an increase that some politicians and citizens have blamed on media violence. A number of influential Japanese game designers are taking a hard look at the games they make, and while none of them are blaming the increases in violence on the gaming industry, a few have expressed concerns.

• Professor reconsiders children's online lives (New York Times)
  Sherry Turkle, a professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes that computers have ushered in "a fundamental reconsideration of human identity." But unlike the academics who criticize the fractured, non-linear experience of Internet life, Turkle finds the fluidity of online identity to be healthy.

• Yahoo! to block adult rooms from UK chat client (ZDNet)
  Internet portal Yahoo! has changed its UK Instant Messenger client to block access to adult chatrooms. Anyone downloading a UK version of the software will not be able to access these rooms. The US version of the software, which anyone can access, will remain unchanged.

• USA - AltaVista under fire from child protection agency (CNET News.com)
  Web portal AltaVista has abandoned many of its community features after the Better Business Bureau found the site too loose in preventing children from visiting adult-only areas. The scrapped services include bulletin boards, chat rooms and online registration.

Issue no. 186 - 3 February 2001

• Young women vulnerable in chatrooms (Nua)
  Up to a quarter of young female Internet users say they have felt frightened or upset about things said to them during chatroom sessions, according to a new report from Ipsos-Reid. Girls were twice as likely as boys to have received unwanted comments of a sexual nature or repeated requests for face-to-face meetings. The report, which includes survey results from 16 countries, found that up to 70 percent of Internet users under the age of 24 use chatrooms frequently.

• UK - Children 'should be freer to roam internet' (Guardian)
  Children should take a "surfing proficiency test" at 11 to allow them a freer ride on the information superhighway, a leading thinktank said. Students who passed should be allowed less restricted access to the internet than schools presently allowed, according to a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research.

• France - Tout sauf du virtuel (powow.net)
  Directeur du site Kazibao.com, Bertrand Brocard doit conjuguer les impératifs d'un espace réservé aux enfants et un encadrement pour éviter les débordements. Puisque sur le Net, "personne ne sait que vous êtes un chien", comment repérer les indésirables, gérer les échanges, prévenir les dangers? Comment, a contrario, ne pas devenir une cible publicitaire quand l'anonymat s'arrête aux données personnelles?

Issue no. 185 - 27 January 2001

• Germany - SPD-Fraktion will mehr Jugendschutz im Internet (Heise)
  Die brandenburgische SPD-Landtagsfraktion will den Jugendschutz im Internet deutlich verstärken. Da die Computer in den Schulen inzwischen fester Bestandteil des Unterrichts seien, trage die Politik jetzt die Verantwortung für die zahlreichen Risiken. Um Jugendschutz im Internet durchzusetzen, bereitet die Fraktion eine parlamentarische Initiative vor.

• UK - Minister tells industry to protect children using chat rooms (Guardian)
  New ways to stop internet chat rooms being used by child sex abusers to meet and "groom" children are being considered, the Home Office minister, Lord Bassam, said. Measures include the improved supervision of chat rooms and "hotlines" so that children could make an official report when they felt they had been the target of an "inappropriate" approach.

• UK - Vorderman attacks Net industry for porn apathy (Yahoo UK)
  In an unprecedented attack on the apathy of the government and the Internet industry, TV broadcaster Carol Vorderman lambasted both for failing to protect children from paedophiles operating online. At a heated debate of the Internet Watch Foundation's (IWF) first parliamentary meeting in the House of Lords, Vorderman stunned the audience with her comments.

Issue no. 184 - 20 January 2001

• USA - Clinton Announces Youth Violence Prevention Efforts (Reuters)
  Saying the United States was moving in the right direction in the fight against youth violence, President Clinton unveiled a Web site and toll-free line aimed at helping parents educate themselves and their children about the problem.

Issue no. 183 - 14 January 2001

• Groups Ask FCC For Child-Friendly Digital TV Rules (Computer User)
  A coalition of child advocacy and media-watchdog groups has urged federal regulators to pass rules requiring digital television broadcasters to promote educational programming and stem "unfair" advertising practices. see also Press Release (CME).

• Internet search for missing children (Press Release)
  Beginning in January, 2001 Cobion and the Swiss missing children organization FREDI (Fondation pour la Recherche d'Enfants Disparus par Internet) will jointly begin searching for missing children over the Internet using Cobion's visual search technology. siehe auch Suche nach vermissten Kindern im Internet (Heise).

• Spieleprüfer fordern Reform des Jugendschutzes (Heise)
  Die Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK), das 1994 gegründete Selbstkontrollorgan der Spieleindustrie in Deutschland, hat ihre Jahresbilanz für 2000 vorgelegt. Von den 930 geprüften PC- und Konsolen-Games erteilten die Tester fast der Hälfte das Etikett "Ohne Altersbeschränkung". Klaus-Peter Gerstenberger, Leiter der in Berlin ansässigen USK, sieht den staatlichen Zensuransatz im Netzzeitalter als überholt an. siehe auch USK will auch ein Rating für Onlinespiele (Heise Online).

• Türkische Kinder im Internetcafe verhaftet (ZDNet Deutschland)
  Um die 130 türkischen Kinder wurden von der Polizei in der zentralanatolischen Stadt Kirikkale vorübergehend in Untersuchungshaft genommen, weil sie in den Internet-Cafés des Ortes herumhingen. Die Behörde befürchtete, das könne ihren Charakter verderben.

• UK - Children's Charities Demand Internet Safety For Children (NCH)
  Seven leading children's charities - NCH, Barnardo's, ChildLine, NSPCC, NCVCCO, NCB and The Children's Society - have joined forces to launch a campaign to call on both the internet and computer industries to make children's safety their top priority. see also Keeping children safe online (Internet Watch Foundation) .

Issue no. 182 - 20 December 2000

• Priorité aux victimes (powow.net)
  Rencontre avec Nicole Tricard, Commissaire divisionnaire, chef de la brigade des mineurs de Paris

• USA - Protecting Kids from Pornography (NRC)
  A National Research Council project on Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography and their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Internet Content. see How X Rates With 'W' (Wired).

Issue no. 181 - 10 December 2000

• 3G could aid paedophiles, experts warn (ZDNet UK)
  Industry experts and clinical psychologists have warned that 3G technology could open up a new channel of abuse for Internet paedophiles while government agencies admit they have not considered the potential dangers the new technology brings

• A blast for the COPA Commission (eWEEK)
  Comment by Michel Zimmermann. I have a high-tech blast, but it won't be my last on the subject. My blast goes out to the Children's Online Protection Act Commission. The group took a powder when it came to making the Internet a safe place for kids.

• Fighting online crime with a parent's drive (Christian Science Monitor)
  Jennifer Granholm is a concerned mother. Like most parents, she worries about what her children might stumble across when they go online to research a school paper or simply send an e-mail to a friend. But unlike the typical suburban mom who wants to make the Net safe for her kids, Ms. Granholm comes equipped to fight Internet bad guys with a few weapons. After all, she's Michigan's attorney general. In other words, she's a concerned mom with subpoena power.

Issue no. 180 - 3 December 2000

• USA - Don't Blame Movies (Washington Post)
  Opinion column by Ronald D. Rotunda. The FTC issued a report accusing the movie industry of "aggressively marketing violence." Then the commission announced it had decided that the First Amendment prevents it from suing Hollywood over this matter. This belated concession shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the FTC's original report, because it had acknowledged there that in fact the entertainment industry plays almost no role in youth violence.

Issue no. 179 - 26 November 2000

• ABA sponsors major international researchers forum (ABA)
  The Australian Broadcasting Authority is a major sponsor of the International Forum of Researchers on Young People and the Media, Sydney, Australia, 26 - 29 November 2000, which will examine examine young people's use of the Internet, media in the home environment, video games, screen violence, television content regulation and policy, and policy and regulation in the global environment.

• Cyberpadres abre un espacio enteramente dedicado a los derechos del niño (Europa Press)
  El sitio Cyberpadres.com ha puesto a disposición de sus usuarios un nuevo servicio de información dedicado a la protección de los derechos de los niños.

• The Age: Teenage boys find out about sex from the Net (The Age)
  The past reliance by adolescent boys on magazines and videos to "discover and share the mysteries of sex" has been superseded by access to lurid images of pornography and bestiality, according to Children's Views About Media Harm, a case study by the Australian Broadcasting Authority and a Sydney university.

• Germany - Baden-Württemberg will das Internet sauber halten (Heise)
  Baden-Württemberg will sich künftig dem Kampf gegen jugendgefährdente Inhalte im Internet widmen. Dazu soll eine landeszentrale Stelle beim Regierungspräsidium Tübingen eingerichtet werden. Sie wird jugendgefährdende Inhalte in den Mediendiensten verfolgen und ahnden. Dabei drohen Bußgelder bis zu 500.000 Mark.

• USA - FTC Says It Won't Sue Hollywood (Washington Post)
  Two months after issuing a report accusing the entertainment industry of aggressively marketing violent, adult-rated entertainment to children, federal regulators decided that they will not pursue legal charges. Such action could be defeated on grounds that the marketing campaigns are probably protected by the Constitution's free-speech provision.

Issue no. 178 - 19 November 2000

• Police chief slams Yahoo! chatroom silence (ZDNet UK)
  The Metropolitan Police has joined the growing list of critics urging Yahoo! to act against paedophiles using its chatroom services. see also Paedophiles can target vulnerable children online. Child psychologists have warned that Internet chatrooms will increase the number of attacks on children in the UK. Child charities unite against Yahoo! chat. Yahoo! yet to respond to charity's criticicsm of its chatroom and messenger facilities.

• Porn sites lure kids (FT)
  Toy manufacturers have become the latest victims of internet pornographers, who are using toy brand names to lure children to their sites. The porn links crop up in these internet searches because the pornographers have inserted the toy names into "meta tags", the labels attached to web pages that identify the page's content, on their sites.

Issue no. 177 - 12 November 2000

• ICANN staff: no to Dot-Kids (Standard)
  Staff of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recommended that no new top-level domains distinguishing between kid-friendly and kid-unfriendly material be added to the Internet at this time. see Report on TLD Applications: Application of the August 15 Criteria to Each Category or Group c. Restricted Content Group.

• Yahoo! blasted for chat room apathy (ZDNet UK)
  Two leading children's charities have lambasted Internet giant Yahoo! for the way it runs its Instant Messaging service and chat rooms. Last week, Yahoo!'s Messenger client was upgraded. On launch, the new client highlighted rooms with clear pedophile themes from the opening screen. Chat rooms alluding to discussion threads clearly inappropriate for children remain accessible.

• UK - IWF Newsgroup Discussion Paper (Internet Watch Foundation)
  The IWF has published its Newsgroup Discussion Paper to initiate an open consultation process on the subject of child pornography in newsgroups.

Issue no. 175 - 29 October 2000

• Government admits education site 'unsuitable' (Yahoo UK)
  The government admitted that its educational Web site Eduweb contains material that is inappropriate for children, after a report condemned the site for allowing millions of children to gain instant access to sexually explicit material and drugs information.

• Zwei Drittel der Eltern ahnungslos über Computerspiele (Heise Online)
  Zwei Drittel aller Eltern kennen nach einer Studie der Universität Bochum die Computerspiele ihrer Kinder nicht, sagte der Bochumer Wirkungsforscher Clemens Trudewind in Nürnberg auf der Jahrestagung der Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften.

• Children's Internet use in USA (UCLA Press Release)
  Adults report that they keep a close eye on children's Internet use, or that they acquire software to help them manage children's access to information. More than 30 percent (32.8) of adults say they use nanny or filtering software, about two-thirds (66.8 percent) require children to ask permission before they log on, and 66.3 percent limit the number of hours children can use the Internet. Respondents under 18 report considerably less online supervision than do adults. For example, 88 percent of adults say they "keep an eye" on what children do on the Internet, while 63.8 percent of children ages 12-17 say that adults in their household keep on eye on their Internet use. see Surveying the Digital Future

Issue no. 174 - 21 October 2000

• USA - COPA commission report published (CNET News.com)
  The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) commission released a report calling for voluntary action on the part of schools, libraries, the technology industry and communities to protect children from so-called harmful material on the Internet. see also No Filtering Recs in COPA Report (Wired) and Parents, Industry Are Best Shields Against Porn (TechWeb). Support Is Growing in Congress for Internet Filters in Schools

Issue no. 173 - 15 October 2000

• FBI urges teaching cyber ethics (Associated Press)
  The Justice Department and the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group, has launched the Cybercitizen Partnership to encourage educators and parents to talk to children in ways that equate computer crimes with old-fashioned wrongdoing.

• Porn Panel: Nix 'Mouse-Trapping' (Wired)
  The Commission on Child Online Protection (COPA) unanimously endorsed a largely hands-off approach to the Internet, while saying that practices such as mislabeling adult sites as innocuous should be against the law. The report says that federal agencies should "consider greater enforcement and possibly rulemaking to discourage deceptive or unfair practices to entice children to view obscene materials, including the practices of 'mouse trapping' and deceptive meta-tagging." see alsoCommission urges more cops in cyperspace (AP).

• USA - Judge Rules on Video Game Ordinance (AP)
  A federal judge has ruled that an Indianopolis city ordinance banning minors from playing violent and sexually explicit video games without parental permission can take effect immediately.

• Zwei neue Kinder-Portale gehen an den Start (Golem Network News)
  Gleich zwei neue Websites für Kinder haben sich während der Internet World in Berlin angekündigt. Beide wollen Kindern nicht nur Spaß, Infos und Chats bringen, sondern zur Beruhigung der Eltern auch eine eigene Filtersoftware gegen potenzielle Schmuddel-Inhalte bieten. Sowohl der Berliner KinderCampus.de als auch die Münchner Site 4Kidz.de richten sich an bis zu 12 Jahre alte Kinder. Beide starten erst mit deutschsprachigen Inhalten, planen aber eine Erweiterung des Angebots auf weitere europäische Sprachen mit entsprechend eigenen Inhalten für die einzelnen Länder.

Issue no. 172 - 8 October 2000

• Disney to Deter Children From Some Areas of Its Web Sites (New York Times)
  The online arm of the Walt Disney Company will take steps to deter children from wandering into areas of its Web sites that contain inappropriate material.

• USA - Porn Panel Nears Consensus On Recommendations (Newsbytes)
  With its legally mandated deadline looming, the COPA Commission charged with advising Congress on how to protect children from "harmful" material on the Internet neared consensus on recommending that Congress support educational efforts, beef up enforcement of existing obscenity laws and help develop better resources for parents. The panel will probably also suggest that Congress offer Web sites some sort of incentive program to abide by a self-imposed rating system for online content.

Issue no. 171 - 1 October 2000

• A Second World Congress in 2001 (ECPAT)
  A second World Congress on commercial and other forms of sexual exploitation of children will be hosted by the Japanese Government in association with the Prefecture of Yokahama. It will take place in Yokahama, Japan 17 - 20 December 2001. The Japanese government, ECPAT International, UNICEF and the NGO Group on the rights of the child will be the organising partners, echoing the partnership format of the first World Congress.

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