Guest Blog – Mike Short – mobile phones have come a long way

This was 20 years ago – can you believe it ?

On the 26th May 1992 the first GSM Mobile Handset worldwide was given Interim Type Approval (ITA)  to connect to GSM networks. This was an ORBITEL 901 device from a manufacturer then co owned by Vodafone and Ericsson.

The Type Approval was challenged by Motorola which had received ITA for its product range on June 3^rd 1992. Motorola at the time expressed surprise and argued that the Orbitel ITA did not complete all the tests defined by GSM operators or against a procedure ratified by the European Commission.

In this race to be first Mike Pinches, the MD of ORBITEL accepted that “there is an element of doubt” . This was all at a time when some GSM networks had been built but, beyond test devices, no GSM customer equipment was available to customers that could compete with the patchwork quilt of incompatible analogue mobile networks at the time .

It was also a period of instability. Some of the test equipment did not work consistently, the testing procedures were not fully accepted across Europe and roaming had not even started. This article marks those 20 years with a quick look back at the market 2 decades ago and illustrates how far we have come.

 The Mobile Market    

According to the Financial Times the Western European market embraced 5 million mobile subscribers on the 1^st May 1992. Today it is 400 million. It was all analogue as the digital GSM devices were not approved or available to connect to networks.

In the UK some investment continued in analogue networks such as TACS as demand continued to rise . The FT estimated the UK market to be 1.2 Million subscribers, or 2.23%  penetration of the population ( in contrast to around 85 Million or 130 % today).  The UK market was at the time still the 2^nd largest in the world, behind the USA and just ahead of Japan which was about to liberalise their devices market from being vertically integrated with the network operators.

The UK growth success was put down to many factors but certainly competition played a part, both at the networks level and at the services/distribution level. It also had benefits of an analogue system called TACS that was closely aligned with the US Analogue technology of AMPS.

There were 2 operators: Racal Vodafone and Cellnet ( now O2 UK ) but most European countries had limited choice as mobile was often run by the incumbent monopoly PTT`S . Notable exceptions to this rule were the Nordic countries where some network competition did exist but they did have long standing public radio service experience to serve deeply rural communities. This is where highest levels of customer adoption ( or “penetration”)  in the world were to be found e.g. Sweden 7.19 % and Finland 6.17%. 

Mobile telephones

Most devices had no screens and data had not really started at any meaningful scale for messaging or email, and certainly there was no Internet access or camera phones/ music players and the rest.

UK Prices

UK prices for mobile telephones in May 1992 (source: FT newsletter – 21/05/1992) were:

Several aspects stand out here – firstly the huge differences between dealer prices (after subsidy) and RRP; the names of the manufacturer market leaders then which have largely changed since in favour of new Korean, Taiwanese and America leaders; and the carphone oriented world in contrast to hand portables today. This largely changed with GSM and the consumerisation of the mobile markets across Europe in the late 1990`s .

However, even then the average weight of hand portable devices had some way to go towards wider portability from the 300 to 400 grams average back in 1992.

Market choice

It is also easy to forget that the early 1990`s saw a proliferation of technologies which came with market liberalisation and the progress of technology.

The mobility choices included some private and public systems, but not all with the same coverage, device choice or pricing profile.

The main mobile options could be plotted against costs (low to high) and geographic mobility parameters :

Paging *; Cordless* (mainly CT2 and DECT); Private Mobile radio ; Cellular (analogue and Digital GSM + PCN) ; Satellite *  (those marked * were public and private systems)  .

The mobility choice was further extended though fixed line options. Solutions such as payphones, charge cards and hotel phones were largely considered as indirect competition .

However, alongside devices, the issue of geographic coverage was often seen as the key driver of demand i.e. where it was easy to make and receive a call .

The real advantage GSM was soon to have was based on international economies of scale applied to R+D reducing unit costs that in turn led to ever widening investment, coverage and handset choice.

By May 1992 some 30 European operators and countries such as Australia/NZ/Gulf states/Iran/India/HK/Singapore/S Africa /Cameroons were seen as early adopters of the technology by the GSM Association.

First year European Costs (US $) (Source  BISMAC Q1 1992 ) – pre Digital

We often forget how far prices have dropped with GSM Digital technology and the consumerisation of mobile .

20 years ago the market was largely a  business market based on business rather than consumer channels. It was completely analogue.

Taking the larger countries at the time we can see how the charges differed .

These first year costs (in US $) are based respectively on handset ( unsubsidised) ; access (1^st Connection and 12 months monthly fees); and lastly airtime ( 90 minutes peak usage per month x 12).

Overall total  Analogue first year costs : -

• France                                            $2634/1304/1380  - total : $5320
• Germany                                       $2619/566/1112      - total : $4297
• Spain                                              $1787 /1004/540    - total : $3331
• Italy                                               $1120 /641 /572      - total : $2333
• UK Cellnet business tariff           $573 /684 / 641       – total :$1898

These comparisons are all analogue tariffs, and they exclude special consumer tariff options such as Cellnet Lifetime or early adopter GSM tariffs. Prepay tariffing did not exist until some 3 to 4 years later. The full impact of analogue/digital competition came much later .

 Conclusion

We have come a long way in mobile in the 20 years since the first mobile device received Type Approval. The rise of mobile globally to over 6.3 Billion is quite remarkable, but could not have happened without those early experiences and experiments with competition and distribution. Much of the change can be put down to technological innovation and the economies of scale associated with GSM adoption globally.

The evolution from GSM into new frequencies and 3G/4G (or LTE) and dual mode Wifi continues to add more capacity and capability.  20 years ago it was a voice world. Internet and data services were essentially non existent. The language of texting and child internet safety had not been invented .

This revolution in communications still has a long way to go but back then in the UK choice was already evident, innovation and competition were its hallmarks.

Mike Short

President
The Institution of Engineering and Technology

Vice President, Telefonica Europe

A very poor report

 

All of the UK’s mobile phone networks run a system of filtering to keep web-based adult content away from children who access the internet via a mobile phone handset. The policy was first introduced voluntarily back in January 2004. It is still in place as a voluntary measure. The filter is applied by default to the great majority of mobile phone accounts. I call it an “adult bar”. I am not wedded to that description. I’d happily call it something else if it helped make clear the filtering that the networks do is not just about pornography. It never has been.

Earlier this week the Open Rights Group and the LSE Media Policy Group (LSE ORG) published a report with a pointedly dramatic and large title: “Mobile censorship: What’s happening and what we can do about it.” The report discussed, or rather it traduced, the adult bar.

That said, much of the smaller print is fine. The report acknowledges that filtering software can play a legitimate part in helping to protect children online. The authors’ main gripes seem to be about the quality of the software i.e. how well it performs its stated tasks, and about when and how it gets turned on. All perfectly reasonable points.

The LSE ORG document also contains several genuinely new and original findings. It shines a light on and makes a number of trenchant observations about the lack of transparency and consistency in relation to the way the adult bar has been implemented on some networks. The networks should address these as soon as they possibly can.

Thus, while I strongly endorse some of the LSE ORG report’s comments and detailed recommendations, I regret to say its principal allegation, that the mobile phone networks are involved in censorship, is demonstrably false. This alone fatally undermines its credibility but, misery upon misery, on top of that it contains other manifest and not insignificant weaknesses and errors.

In the bulk of the remainder of this blog I’m going to focus mainly on those weaknesses and errors. As a work of scholarship the LSE ORG report misses the mark by quite a distance. Even as a campaigning pamphlet, which is what I think it really is, it fails because its flaws are so numerous and so easy to expose.

I will not go through every point with which I disagree or that I believe to be inaccurate or incomplete. This response is way too long as it is. What follows are my comments only in respect of what I think are the LSE ORG report’s more egregious shortcomings.

I am trying to set the record straight.

Ours not to reason why?

One very obvious lacuna is the lack of any mention of the reasons why the mobile networks introduced the adult bar in the first place. And why did the fixed line ISPs not follow suit? There is a history. There is a context. But LSE ORG do not relay it.

The mobile phone networks’ reasoning was important at the time and it remains relevant today. But you are left to guess at what it might have been. Clearly a desire to protect children was part of it, however that was not the whole story, not by a long chalk.

Bad language

Perhaps even more remarkable is the absence of any definition of what is meant by the word “censorship”. This is no small failing in a document that uses such a highly charged, loaded, attention-grabbing word in its masthead.

Using your favourite search engine take a look at most of the coverage the report received in the immediate aftermath of its publication. The idea that the UK’s mobile phone companies practice censorship has been successfully broadcast around the world. One has to assume this was done wilfully and deliberately. What a shame it isn’t true.

I double checked with the offline Oxford Shorter and the online edition of the Oxford English dictionary. When the word “censor” is used as a verb it means

Examine (a book, film, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.

An example of what the lexicographers had in mind is given

In the national interest the letters she received were censored.

When used as a noun, i.e. to describe “a censor” the definition runs as follows

An official who examines books, films, news, etc. that are about to be published and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security

Again a specimen sentence is provided to illustrate the intended import

The report was approved by the military censors.

My guess is these definitions accord with what most people think censorship is about. The idea carries with it a great deal of baggage, none of it good. It conjures up sinister images of tin pot dictatorships, zealots, soldiers, clerics, repression. If you use the “c” word you are playing into that space and those emotions.

The underlying reasons for engaging in censorship typically are purposeful and deliberate e.g. they are connected to the censor’s religious or political beliefs, their desire to preserve a group’s grip on power or authority, their view of what is in the national interest or what is acceptable in terms of taste and decency.

Through cutting, redaction, altering or refusing to release, censorship is about keeping images, words, films, radio broadcasts, books, speeches, articles, whatever, from reaching the eyes and ears of the general population over which the censor exercises control. The effects of the censor’s actions are usually meant to be permanent or at any rate to last for a long time, or cover a particular period the censor thinks is relevant.

What the mobile phone companies do is nothing like this. It is not even close.

A special meaning?

In the context of the report is the word “censorship” meant to have a special meaning, one that is outside the normal frame of reference or common understanding? If it is you wouldn’t know it. The matter is not discussed. Elision is the order of the day.

Right at the beginning of the report, in the Introduction on page 5, we are offered a definition of the word “block” which, in the very next sentence, effortlessly transforms into “filter”. This pattern repeats. “Censor” merges with “block”, melds with “filter”.

Thanks to Word’s ability to count such things I can tell you that “censorship” or “censor” appears ten times in the report, including the title and contents page. However, in the body of the text “filter” or “filtering” or “block” and “blocking” appear 116 and 139 times respectively. Filtering is blocking is censorship is the insistent beat of LSE ORG’s drum.

No attempt to convey any nuanced shades of difference is attempted. In the Daily Star  this would not be surprising. Yet “filter” and “block” can have quite distinct and particular meanings. These meanings are not coterminous with each other much less with the common usages of either “censorship” or “censor”. Terms such as these should not be mixed up in the way they are.

More bad language

In the fifth paragraph of the Introduction the authors say

Mobile internet filtering blocks too much content, and applies to too many people, meaning it effectively adds up to a system of censorship across UK networks. (bold added by me for emphasis)

So is it censorship or is it something else which, though different, amounts to the same thing? Without a definition it’s hard to know what sort of qualification “effectively” is meant to convey. We are on shifting sands.

On page 8, last sentence, the report puts “censor” between inverted commas, indicating perhaps that we should not read it too literally. But since we have no idea what literal meaning the authors want us to have in our heads to begin with it is difficult to know what aspect of that meaning we should disregard. Are the authors suggesting that what they are talking about isn’t really censorship at all (which indeed it isn’t)? If that is the case, ought they not to have been more careful with their choice of title and much of the rest?

What the mobile phone companies do

LSE ORG tell us on page 5 what they mean by “block” i.e. blocking is what happens when a user is prevented from connecting to a given site. Er, that’s it. This appears to be the platform on which a great deal of their edifice is built.

But what LSE ORG do not say at this point is that this inaccessibility is a contingent state. We are not told that it can be reversed, removed altogether almost in the twinkling of an eye. The adult bar is not an iron curtain. It’s more a silken veil on a well lubricated draw string. We have to wait until page 9 before we are told about this important qualifying fact. Even then it is briefly, baldly and crisply stated and swiftly left. No elaboration. No discussion. Nothing.

Why do I say that what the mobile phone companies do is not censorship as it is normally understood? Precisely because anyone can get access to anything and everything that is behind the adult bar. They merely have to express a wish to do so and prove they are over 18. This is common practice in many other areas of British life and has been for countless years. No one is saying that any web site or any content should be suppressed or redacted or that anything is immoral, obscene or a threat to national security. All that is being said is that kids should not have ready access to it.

At worst it could be a minor irritation

At worst, or at best depending on where you are coming from, all you can say is that the mobile phone networks have put a few bumps in the road, some chicanes or traffic control measures in place. These are no more than a minor inconvenience or an irritation. Once you have negotiated them you are out on the highway with no restrictions of any kind.

Once in your life

And by the way you only have to do this negotiation once in your life. Not every time you use your phone to connect to the internet. Typically it will take about 30 seconds, perhaps a tad more if the network is running slowly that day. This is because your adult/not adult status is linked to the SIM card, not the handset. Thus unless you change your telephone number or your mobile phone network you will never have to go through this process again. Ever. It might have been helpful if this had been explained by LSE ORG. It wasn’t.

The process is reversible. If you had the adult bar lifted once and you want to have it reimposed you can. You could then get it lifted again later although, and I  now need to amend my earlier statement, it will cost you another 30 seconds to repeat and complete the age verification process.

Quite why someone might want to have the adult bar reimposed and lifted again later is not obvious. I suppose they could be in the habit of lending their phone to someone else and that someone else is a child. But while changing handsets or passing handsets on to a third party e.g. following an upgrade, might be quite common, I wonder how frequently people lend out or temporarily abandon their telephone number? Not very often I imagine. Again this point might, with profit, have been mentioned by LSE ORG. It wasn’t.

I know many adults who are perfectly well aware that the bar is in place on their phone. They know they could easily get the bar lifted but they choose to leave it in place. They like the idea that, without them having to do more, porn, violence and the like cannot get through because of an inadvertent slip up when typing something into Google.

How does this compare?

In many other parts of their lives, in order to gain access to particular types of content, places or services, adults accept much more onerous encumbrances than those imposed by the mobile networks in relation to this area of policy. Apart from a few grumpy old curmudgeons these hurdles are generally accepted as part of a series of socially negotiated policies designed to shield children from exposure to potentially harmful experiences. I’m thinking about the rules surrounding entrance to licensed premises, to cinemas showing 18 rated movies, TV watersheds, access to sex shops, gaining a driving licence. Opening a bank account can involve an enormous amount of time and paper work yet we all submit to it at least once.

To portray what the mobile companies are doing as being in any way sinister or illiberal is tendentious and completely unwarranted. It smacks of propaganda which is ideologically rooted in another era, when the internet was something very different from what it is now.

Selective quotes

The report selectively quotes the Byron Review and the Bailey Review. It misses out, for example, the following extract taken from paragraph 46 on page 38 of Bailey

….. it is not acceptable to expect parents to be solely responsible for what their children see online, and industry must take greater responsibility for controlling access to adult material online in the same way as they do when providing this sort of content through other channels, such as cinema, television, DVDs or adult magazines. We believe that there is no logical reason for not bringing internet-enabled devices into line with other platforms in order to protect children from inappropriate material.

Or this from paragraph 4.60 on page 94 of the 2008 Byron Review

For these reasons I do not recommend that the UK pursue a policy of blocking non-illegal material at a network level at present. However, this may need to be reviewed if the other measures recommended in this report fail to have an impact on the number and frequency of children coming across harmful or inappropriate content online.

Note the date. Four years ago.

The Ofcom Review? The BlackBerry Affair? The IWF?

Bizarrely the LSE ORG report makes no reference to the 2008 Ofcom Review of the mobile networks’ operation of the adult bar. The Ofcom review runs completely counter to the impression given elsewhere in the LSE ORG document that the whole policy is being run by a bunch of out of control cowboys who do what they like with no accountability to anyone or any thing.

Equally the lessons learned from the “BlackBerry Affair” might have been worth a sentence or two, and ditto in relation to the system for blocking illegal content that is in place linked to the IWF’s list. Nobody can ask for or get the IWF list lifted because it contains only illegal content. Neither is this censorship because the items on the list are illegal. You cannot “censor” items that should not be published in the first place.

None of the three topics featured in this section’s heading were mentioned in the LSE ORG report. Why?

The policy does not apply only to pay-as-you-go phones

Another niggle, but not a small one: on page 5, second paragraph of the Introduction, the report suggests the adult bar is applied only to pay-as-you-go phones. It isn’t. It never has been. The policy applies almost as comprehensively to monthly accounts as well.  Of all the mobile networks in the UK only “3″ does not now apply the adult bar by default to monthly account holders. In the case of 3 if you have a monthly account and you want it you have to ask for the adult bar to be applied. This was also the case with Orange until they merged with T Mobile to form Everything Everywhere. Orange has already or soon will fall in line with the majority in relation to monthly accounts.

Evidence from Down Under? I don’t think so

Now I turn to some of the “evidence” which is adduced in LSE ORG’s report. It purports to address the question of mistakes.

The Queensland newspaper the “Courier-Mail” is not a source which I imagine features regularly in the footnotes of academic publications. Yet it makes an appearance here in footnote 9 on page 11 linked to the following paragraph:

When the wrong content or site is blocked by a filtering system, it is called “over-blocking”. In Australia, for example, it was reported that a “Queensland dentist, a tuck shop convenor and kennel operator have been included in a secret ‘blacklist’ of sites to be banned by Australia’s communications watchdog.

Before looking at this (non) evidence more closely I want to refer briefly to page 15, third paragraph where LSE ORG have a little dig at how “current” the mobile networks’ policy framework and documentation are. The authors are hinting that in the high-tech world it is important to be up to date yet here they suggest it is clear the networks probably aren’t.

Now back to Oz and the Queensland Courier-Mail. You wouldn’t know it from the main body of the LSE ORG report but anyone clicking on the link provided in the footnote would see that the story they refer to actually appeared in March, 2009. What they still wouldn’t see or probably know, because the newspaper does not reveal this either, is the incident which gave rise to the coverage concerned something that happened in early 2008.

A lot of bits and bytes have flowed under countless virtual bridges since then but let that pass. I still cite Cicero on occasions. Ancient history has its place but it would be good to know, upfront, that that is what it is if it isn’t obvious from the context, which in this case it isn’t. I appreciate that only a super-nerd like myself actually clicks on footnotes and reads them. I apologise for being a swot, but there you go.

LSE ORG correctly describes what was reported in the Queensland Courier-Mail. What LSE ORG neglected to do, however, was establish and report the whole truth. That is not to be found on the pages of the Queensland Courier-Mail.

The Australian communications watchdog referred to in the article, the one that constructed the list of web sites being complained of, is the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). I contacted them. I’ll happily forward a copy of their reply to anyone who asks for it.

The upshot is this: the three URLs referred to had indeed been blacklisted. At the relevant time the website owners were not using the individual names. This left them ripe for hijacking. And that’s what happened. They did contain child abuse images at the time they were investigated. In May 2008 when they were re-checked by ACMA the child pornography had disappeared so the URLs came off the blocking list. The sites were then free of any and all restrictions. I’d say that was an important bit of the context or background to the Courier-Mail “revelation”.

In the UK the IWF administers a similar system. It blacklists URLs found to contain child abuse images. Sites on that blacklist are blocked. The IWF checks every 12 hours to see if the status of a blocked URL which contained illegal content has changed. If the illegal content has gone the URL comes off the list. I don’t know if ACMA now does something similar in Oz but various agencies around the world do. It is now regarded as best practice. If it was a problem back in early 2008 it needn’t be now. Couldn’t this dimension have been mentioned?

“Over 60″ blocked sites

The LSE ORG report presents other evidence to support its argument.

They created a special web site, www.blocked.org.uk. The landing page is that of the “Open Rights Group Campaign” where we are told

Network operators are default censoring the mobile Internet, in case children access adult material. But often the wrong websites are blocked. Help us report when that happens. 

As we shall see, that’s an interesting use of the word “often”.

The site seeks information from the public about URLs that they think have been wrongly made inaccessible. During the period January – March 2012 they received “over 60″ such pieces of information. OK I know they could have received 59 on one day and only one more during the whole of the rest of the period but I’m going to live on the edge a bit here and venture that they received an average of 20 per month. I trust that relying on that number will not lead me wildly astray.

Whilst it is accepted that even a single instance of mistaken, unjustified or otherwise erroneous blocking is regrettable and ought to be investigated, and generally I am not a numbers-game-person, at 20 per month or even 60 per month I am still struggling to get my head around the scale of the outrage being suggested.

I have had a little difficulty hunting down the following numbers so I will explain exactly what I did. Experian, one of the UK’s largest credit reference agencies, runs a web site called “Hitwise”. It monitors and reports on web traffic.

According to Hitwise analyst James Murray Facebook receives “over 1.3 billion visits per month” from UK based internet users. And in December, 2011, visits to Facebook amounted to 15% of “all UK internet page views”.  My Babbage difference engine tells me that means altogether in the month of December 2011 there were roughly 8.5 billion internet page views that originated with requests made from within the UK. The number of attempts to reach URLS obviously was very likely to be a lot higher than that but let’s stick with what we know for now.

According to another excellent web site run by a company called Tecmark, at the end of July 2011 about 12.6% of all web traffic could be traced to mobile phones.

Tecmark’s site is showing exceptionally rapid growth in the use of mobiles to access the internet so 12.6% almost certainly understates the real percentage for the relevant period. By January-March 2012 it would have been higher but I’m happy to work with the lower percentage even though it will hurt rather than help my case.

Assuming 12.6% won’t be very far off the mark it suggests that, on average round that time, out of the UK per month over 1 billion visits to web site were made using a mobile phone browser. Again what I have not been able to discover, perhaps to set Blocked.org. uk’s 20 per month in its proper context, is how many attempts on mobiles fail anyway for any of several possible reasons, probably the most common being caused by mistyping the address, timeouts arising from network congestion or server overload. Whatever the number of failures is going to be it will have to motor a little to make 20 seem significant. 20 seems not so much like small beer as sub-atomic. When dealing with those kinds of volumes 20, or “over 60″, barely compute.

The one does not explain or justify the other

I hear the howls. One doesn’t explain or excuse the other. The fact that phones fail to connect for technical reasons is no justification for ignoring or allowing another series of failures to be layered on top, especially if they are policy based, can be avoided or they are evil. Moreover LSE ORG did not claim to be doing a quantitative study of the rates of failure to connect which were due to inappropriate decisions about classification. They were merely gathering in examples of the same.

I buy all that but nonetheless LSE ORG are still presenting us with a rather slender reed.  Can it bear the weight of the enormous ask they are making of the whole of the British mobile phone industry? LSE ORG are suggesting they abandon something they have been doing for over 8 years, something they chose to do voluntarily and for good reason. The industry spent tens of millions of pounds to put the measures in place. It might cost the same or more to pull them out. On this point too, cost, the report is silent.

And since 2004, when all this began, has the quality of democratic, literary, artistic, or political life in Britain in any detectable way been worsened by the policy? By other things, maybe. By this policy? No. But some children, perhaps many children, have been spared exposure to things that no one of their age should have to or be able to witness. ”Over 60″ mistakes does not substantiate the charge of censorship.

Pyongyang is put in charge of internet policy

One of the more ludicrous suggestions in the report is that by using filtering here in the UK we somehow provide succour and comfort to tyrants overseas. If I really thought that Kim Jong-un or any of his illustrious predecessors gave a flying banana about what the UK’s mobile phone networks do to protect children…It is too ridiculous for words.

We cannot hand over control of policy on the internet to the most barbaric, reactionary, anti-democratic governments on Earth. Neither can we give them a veto over how we best protect our children. Either you agree with this line of policy or you don’t. It stands or falls on its own merits, or lack of them. Enough already with intellectually bankrupt arguments about non-existent slippery slopes.

But herein lies a tension within the report. On page 21 the following passage appears

Furthermore, if online censorship is widespread and accepted with little opposition as a way to implement a broad range of public policy issues, it becomes far harder to argue for Internet freedom elsewhere. Other governments and companies around the world use the same technologies to restrict access to online material and offer the same arguments about taste, decency and citizens’ safety.

I’m tempted to add that the task is not made any easier by people who misrepresent what is being done to protect children by falsely calling something censorship when it is not. The report at this point is getting pretty close to saying all filtering is bad or pointless or both, a view that I know is widely held in some quarters.

Networks’ inconsistencies and incoherence

As mentioned earlier, what the LSE ORG report revealed about the inconsistencies, indeed the incoherence of the way some of the mobile phone networks appeared to operate parts of their filtering policy, particularly around the practice of age verification and appeals against wrongful inclusion on an adult list, are genuinely new and important. Strike that. They are very important and I will be acting on the basis of what they have revealed.

If LSE ORG had limited themselves to saying only that they thought the mobile companies should take more care to explain the basis of their policy (to everyone), took more care to explain how to get the adult bar lifted, ran age verification policies which were applied properly and consistently, and if they had simply urged the networks to get better at swiftly adjudicating on any claims of unjustified or mistaken classification, correcting them where necessary, then I would be alongside them, agreeing with them.

We want good and better filtering. We are against bad filtering. We should be seeking to build on the systems we already have in place, not simply throwing our hands up and abandoning the task altogether, saying all filtering is rubbish and always will be. To be fair, LSE ORG appear to be agreeing with me when they call for more granular filtering e.g. on page 22.

Filtering should never be used, either overtly or covertly, to deny anyone their human rights, including children. No rational person could want children not to be able to access sites which might provide them with guidance about sexual health or indeed any information about what’s going on in the world. Everyone I work with encourages children to assert themselves, to know or find out about and claim their rights. The web, the internet, is a perfect vehicle for doing that. Freedom of association and expression are cardinal values which again are greatly enhanced by what the internet makes possible, for young and old alike.

Only a fool would ever say filtering alone is enough to keep a child safe when they go online. Teaching children how to use the internet, helping parents to understand how young people use the technology so they, in turn, can engage constructively with their children, these are the preferred routes and they are the best routes for most children.

But education and awareness will not work for everyone. Technical measures can help, often help a lot, particularly with younger children. Perhaps, in the end therefore, the difference between me and the authors of the LSE ORG report is in relation to what I consider to be a tolerable level of inefficiency in filtering when set beside the advantages it offers.

Techies often take the view that unless something works with 100% certainty all of the time it is “broken”. I don’t. I think we have to be more pragmatic. While we struggle on in the quest for perfection, for 100% certainty all of the time, I want to know how we can make things better now.

With LSE ORG I share the aim of wanting zero instances of incorrect classification. I also want zero instances of adults having to live with the adult bar for a moment longer than is necessary, consistent with the underlying aim of the policy. But you can get all that without abandoning what the networks are currently doing or turning it completely on its head.

An even bigger target

It is pretty clear why LSE ORG have jumped into this debate at this particular moment. We get to it around page 29 of the report where Jeremy Hunt’s speech to the Royal Television Society in September 2011 is quoted. Here he promised, inter alia, to bring forward new measures to protect children online. The authors are fearful that, in the wake of the report of Claire Perry MP, the current discussions on “Active Choice” will move towards default filtering on fixed line services, perhaps installed at network level, thereby copying what the the mobile networks do.

I can see there is little point publishing a paper designed to influence policy twelve months after all the decisions about the policy have been taken. But if you are going to step into a fight of that kind you need to make sure you’ve done your homework and your thinking a little more thoroughly than LSE ORG appear to have managed on this occasion.

Gains and losses

The authors do not at any point discuss how you balance out the acknowledged, if minor, inconvenience or irritation which the mobile phone companies’ measures might cause an adult for approximately 30 seconds once in their lifetime, against the potential benefits claimed for the safety of children.

Furthermore the related debate about the link between risk and harm does not get an airing. My own view is, if you are a parent, that discussion can be reduced to nought if your child has just been harmed, especially if he or she has been badly harmed. It is very hard to judge what constitutes an acceptable level of risk but it is very easy to judge what is an acceptable level of harm:  nil. Telling a parent after the event that the risk was quite low so, in effect, their traumatised child was just unlucky I suspect will butter no parsnips.

Feminists’ objection to the way pornography objectifies women and contributes to the over- sexualisation of society, tending to reduce or demean the status of women as well as contributing to the coarsening of society, certainly is partly linked to concerns about the impact on children, particularly boys, but that is not the sole or principal driver.

Consequently even if you were not wholly convinced that the advantages of default filtering are real or significant or would necessarily help with any of the points just made, isn’t there nonetheless enough surrounding uncertainty to convince you that there could be something in the claims being made and therefore since, other things being equal, all that is at stake is about 30 seconds of your whole life, where’s the beef? You probably waste 30 seconds every day just wondering which version of soduko to play after lunch.

As a matter of fact I am convinced about the potentially serious risk of harm that exposure to certain types of pornography and violent images can do to children, particularly younger children, and I can see the case for restricting children’s access to sites promoting alcohol, tobacco and similar. That is why I favour default filtering, as one measure among many others. But I am also convinced there is unlikely ever to be a level of settled, universally accepted or mathematical certainty about the impact these things have on young people’s pyscho-social development, at least not such as would satisfy every academic or politician on the planet.

In this area of policy everything hinges on the context and the single most important variable in that context is the child himself or herself. How can you legislate for that? It’s simple. You can’t. But that does not support a position where you end up doing nothing. Default filtering provides a minimal safety net, no more than that.

As the internet becomes a more mature and ubiquitous presence in our lives it is vital that we continue to track its impact on society, which means its impact on people in all their glorious and inglorious varieties. The more we know the more we can do to refine policy and make it better. At least that’s the hope although there are some questions, and this may be one of them, which are so overlaid with cultural, political, historic, legal, religious, technical and economic considerations that I sometimes wonder if my belief in the value of research is too naively optimistic.

Perhaps all we can ever do is go with our best estimates and judgements based on the evidence we have available to us at the time and what we think is right or what we think will do the least amount of harm to “non-believers” consistent with achieving a given social policy goal? But who decides how this balance is to be struck?

Do we need a new institution?

In a recent blog Professor Sonia Livingstone, also of the LSE, suggested maybe what we need is a trusted independent body of some kind to step up e.g. an Ofcom, a BBFC or similar, a body that is used to dealing with complexity and weighing competing claims against each other, reaching a considered view with which (almost) everyone is prepared to live. Leaving it to the rough house of headline writers, financially motivated calculations in company Board Rooms, religious leaders or free speech activists, yes even children’s rights campaigners, is no way to run a brewery much less decide a key facet of public policy.

I buy that. Even though I completely reject the idea that what the mobile companies are doing could in any way properly be called censorship I do accept that people can have reasonable apprehensions about the possibility of computer based systems getting things wrong, whether by accident or otherwise.

My anxieties about the potential political manipulation of such a set up by a UK Government of the day are close to zero because that is not part of our tradition, but even so I am not stupid enough to think everyone sees things that way. “Trust me I’m a politician” is not a winning line. The Government should have no involvement in the operational side of anything like this although, in order to do the work, Parliament may need to add to the powers of an existing body or create a new one.

Livingstone’s idea therefore has a great deal of merit. Such an organization would need to draw on people from all of the stakeholder communities, of whom the free speech and civil liberties lobby is undoubtedly a major one.

All families and all children are not the same

Earlier I said “education and awareness will not work for everyone”. This brings me to another of my major criticisms of the LSE ORG report. It is blithely written as if, in one key respect at least, all families were the same, all children were the same.

In the world that LSE ORG inhabits all parents were or could be equally adept at installing or triggering filters. Looked at through their rose tinted glasses every family gathers around a cosy hearth after dinner of an evening to have genial, measured discussions, led by a confident techno-aware parent, about how to behave if not generally then certainly specifically in relation to the internet. The complexity of the technology, the power of the Leviathans of Silicon Valley hold no terrors for them. They have seen through the hegemonic, libertarian zeitgeisty razzmatazz that the rich people on the West Coast have so assiduously promoted. Likewise their children are capable of understanding all parental pronouncements which they appreciate have been determined with only their best interests at heart, underpinned by the wisdom of Solomon.

I am tempted to say “Give me a break”, but that might seem a bit peremptory or rude.

If we know with absolute certainty, and here I think we do, that “out there” there is an enormous range of personal circumstances, levels of self-confidence about dealing with technology, and that these are more or less randomly distributed across all families and all children, what is our responsibility? Is it to ensure that Guardian readers in NW3 (of whom I am one) are not discommoded to any degree?

The authors of the LSE ORG report say they would be happier if the mobile networks took off all the controls and put more effort into informing parents how to turn them on or use them. Why not do it the other way around? Leave the controls on and put more effort into ensuring people know how to get the controls removed? Internet devices should be as safe as they can be by default. People should have to jump through hoops to render products less safe, not safer. This is more or less how it works in every other part of the consumer electronics market.

Now that the internet is part of that market why should it be any different? People “buy the internet” in supermarkets these days, along with the baked beans. Two of our biggest ISPs are essentially TV companies that bundle the internet with the Disney Channel.

The precautionary principle

To conclude, if there was any hard evidence at all that the mobile phone companies’ policy might actually do some harm to children, that would be a serious point against the current practice. No such evidence exists or has ever been produced.

Other objections to the policy of default filtering are often couched in terms of people’s worries about how the policy impacts on adults’ rights and sensibilities, or about how it could be deliberately manipulated for unstated, dark reasons. Glib, and in the Australian case inaccurate, or unsubstantiated references are sometimes made about such policies’ potential to interfere with economic activity or innovation.

Of course these latter points are not unimportant considerations but, even if they were was any evidence to support them, which there isn’t, civilized society typically always gives the benefit of the doubt to its young.

In other words unless adults’ rights or sensibilities were to an appreciable degree being injured or compromised, or unless it could be shown that economic activity or innovation were being materially harmed or reduced, I’m afraid in my book they cannot trump a child’s right to protection. A 30 seconds wait is not a big ask.

A grand vision

 

On 2^nd May the Commission of the European Union published a very important document. It is entitled a “Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions”. The short title on the full document is “European Strategy for a Better Internet for Children”. Alternatively, according to the Commission’s press release, it should be referred to as “Digital Agenda: New strategy for safer internet and better internet content for children and teenagers.” 

Apart from the novel multiple choice of inelegant, over lengthy titles, both of which appear to have abandoned the indefinite article, I have to say the substance of the Commission’s new text provides a truly excellent survey of the landscape of online child protection. It neatly summarises where we are now and also paints quite a detailed picture of where we ought to be heading. 

Now calm down. We musn’t suspend all of our critical faculties or get too carried away. They’ll only get big-headed. And let’s not forget there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. A statement, sorry a “Communication”, is one thing. The actualité may turn out to be something else.

Plus a road map

Better and better. Helpfully the document also includes a road map. I counted 73 different action points distributed between three classes of actors: the Commission itself, industry and Member States. The list of actors is too narrowly focused but I will return to that towards the end of the blog. Also the timescales associated with the road map are a little vague. They will definitely need refining.

As far as I could see none of the proposals contained in the document are original but what is completely new and absolutely marvellous is the way hitherto disparate strands of policy from across several different Directorates have been gathered in to a single place and woven together into a new and stronger platform. The whole is undoubtedly greater than the sum of the individual parts. It’s a real silo-buster.

One little alarm bell

The area where undoubtedly the strategy document is weakest, however, is in terms of spelling out, or rather not spelling out, the organizational and institutional arrangements which will underpin its implementation. Given the number and magnitude of some of the declared goals this could be a fatal flaw.  

I was wondering. Are such things dealt with inside the Commission by a different process, a process which obviates the need to set out that type of detail in a document of this kind? I sincerely hope the explanation is something like that.

What I am trying to push from my mind is even the faintest suspicion that the Commission believes it can carry this off with broadly the level of resourcing and the organizational arrangements that they have now.

Perhaps someone high up imagines industry, for example, will spontaneously, without further prompting or significant help, organize itself in such a way as to deliver on many or even most of the targets set against their name.  If anyone is harbouring such thoughts they are egregiously mistaken. The reality police will shortly be knocking on their doors. Charges of criminally unworldly optimism will soon be made out. 

But there is also another reason why I feel a little anxious about the housekeeping elements. The press release referred to earlier is graced by the presence of three different EU Commissioners. Vice President Neelie Kroes, Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, goes first. Vice President and Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is second and common or garden Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom of Home Affairs brings up the rear.

Clearly at one level it is fantastic that such senior figures wish to be actively associated with this area of policy. But three Commissioners, which also means three Cabinets and three Directorates, inevitably introduces a level of political and organizational complexity which implies….. Well it implies many things some of which are very far from good. The scope for hostile forces and their lobbyists to start mixing it, making mischief, attempting to drive in wedges, delay or confuse things, is legion.

The nascent, brave inter-disciplinary path which the Communication represents could founder on the rocks of bureaucratic inertia and the sort of responsibility avoidance habits which can so easily flourish within any large organization where overall responsibility for an area of policy is less than completely clear. Online child protection’s Great EU Helmsperson is who?

Arguably there should also have been a fourth Commissioner’s name on the document: Michel Barnier, the Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services. The strategy document quite rightly talks a lot about e-commerce. It alludes to how different approaches to online child safety might impact on the emergence of a single market in a number of key areas. But I am guessing that adding an extra Commissioner to the mix does not increase the degree of complexity and the associated risk of failure simply by a factor of 1. It’s likely to be a non-linear equation.

For some time now we have had within DG Justice a Children’s Rights Co-ordinator as well as a more broadly-based Inter-Service Group on Children’s Rights but, at least until this paper emerged, it has been difficult to detect much evidence of collegiality and one wonders how much they had to do with writing it anyway. Properly located and adequately resourced management structures do not mean success is inevitable in any endeavour, but their absence can be a near certain guarantee of failure.

Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Turning to the strategy document in more detail we see straight away that it contains a great deal of useful data and evidence about the need to act. It also presents an overview of the uneven levels of development of online child protection policy at national level among EU Member States. As already mentioned, the paper then knits together all of the EU’s current initiatives in the field. If nothing else, this makes it a very useful reference point.

The document speaks of the need to develop an “eco system” which will support children’s participation in and beneficial use of cyberspace. Whilst acknowledging the pioneering work which several bits of the Commission have undertaken in the past it goes on to recognise that they

…..have not been combined in a coherent framework.

Just so you don’t miss the point

EU policies so far have not sufficiently recognised that children constitute a specific target audience for the internet…..Europe needs a strategy that will prevent market fragmentation and create a safer richer environment for all EU children online.

Bang on. The document then makes a major strategic point

It is proposed to combine a series of instruments based around legislation, self-regulation and financial support. Legislation will not be discarded, but preference will be given to self-regulation” 

I think we may need to revisit this when we see the denouement of the current processes surrounding the CEO Coalition. I am currently in the midst of a mild depression about the likely outcomes, hence my earlier remarks about unjustified optimism on the part of Commission officials. We shall see. I hope I am wrong. My faith in self-regulation has taken quite a battering these past months. 

The four pillars

The eco system the paper says future strategy will be based on is founded on four pillars:

High quality content online for children and young people

This is further sub-divided under two headings. The first is about stimulating the production of appealing creative and educational online content.

The second addresses positive online experiences for “young children”. I’m not sure if “young children” as opposed to “young people” slipped in there by mistake or if it was intentionally meant to shift the focus on to tiny tots. I’m relaxed either way but it’s an interesting thought.  What happened to the “teenagers” who were mentioned in at least one of the annunciations? 

There is also a reference not simply to teaching children how to use different online applications but also how their digital skills might lead them to becoming actively engaged citizens. Bravo. I might have liked also to see a mention of encouraging more children to learn how to make their own applications. Many of our most successful internet businesses were kicked off by guys who essentially were programmers. 

Stepping up awareness and empowerment

In this section three sub-headings appear: digital and media literacy and teaching online safety in schools comes first, followed by scaling up awareness activities and youth participation. The document then refers to the importance of simple and robust reporting tools. The latter is one of the “Kroes 5 points” so I assume it appears in the strategy document largely for completeness but also to remind everyone it isn’t going away any time soon.

Creating a safe environment for children online

This is the largest individual pillar. It is also where, presumably for the same reason, a further three of the Kroes 5 points appear: wider availability and use of parental controls, age-appropriate privacy settings and the wider use of age rating and content classification.

I have no problem at all with the last of this list of three. I am certain there is a lot more that can and should be done in relation to content classification, where assigning an age rating will be a big part of it. Not the only part. Yes people will want to know if a particular web page contains images or other materials which are not suitable for, say, typical 5 year olds, but they might equally be interested to know what it’s actually about e.g. is it full of racist bigotry or is it about cookery? 

There is probably a great deal sites can also do with technical tools to help in terms of speedily checking out whether content has been correctly classified or determining if it is in breach of their terms and conditions. 

In that regard we need urgently to start thinking about apps as content and look at the efficacy of the different ratings systems that are being developed for that specific market. But what I hope no one is thinking about is trying to treat user generated content as if it is the same as the output of Disney, the BBC or Hustler magazine for that matter. 

I appreciate this might raise difficult questions about definitions. Maybe we will need a new body of some sort which can adjudicate on such matters where there is doubt or a dispute, but it would be absurd to tie ourselves up in semantic knots and perhaps delay everything interminably on the grounds that we might otherwise discriminate against commercial enterprises as compared with private individuals. As someone whose name escapes me once said 

I can’t define an elephant but I would know it if one walked into the room 

In other words all we may be able to do is set out broad principles. How they work in practice will come down to a finding of fact. Case by case. This is pretty much how advertising regulators have operated for years. Any suggestion that content must be pre-moderated and approved or classified before it goes up would be a step too far.

Fighting against child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation

This is the fourth pillar of the new strategy and also the fifth and final Kroes point to feature in the document.

Here there are two sub-headings. The first concerns the faster and systematic identification and take down of child sex abuse material. However, it has to be said that in this instance the principal obstacles are generally not to be found within or near the internet industry.

We do not know how swiftly every hotline turns around reports and hands them to the police. We do not know this because mostly their work is not audited and reported on in that way. The commonly held perception, however, is that slow take down speeds are mainly linked to under resourcing police services in those countries where law enforcement insist they retain sole responsibility for issuing the notices to remove illegal material.

The second sub-heading in this section refers to the international dimension to work in this area. There are several top class proposals plus a reference to an important aspect of policy that came up many times in the debate about the Directive.

This concerns the EU’s activities as a giver of aid to non-EU Member States or in relation to its trade and tariff negotiations with non-EU Member States. The EU’s powers and activities in foreign relations and diplomacy generally are also relevant in this context.

If a particular non-EU country is proving difficult or uncooperative and illegal images are remaining on public view on servers within their jurisdiction beyond any reasonable timeframe, the suggestion is that the EU should make improving that country’s performance in terms of speeding up take down times part of any bi-lateral aid package or trade and tariff deal. Does this mean yet a fifth Commissioner must now enter stage left?

Roll of drums

Although I made the point earlier that you would struggle to find anything in the document that was wholly original, equally I hope it is also clear that it would be wrong to think of it as being simply a reiteration or embellishment of the Kroes 5 points. Its cross-cutting nature is remarkable.

I was particularly pleased to see, for example, references to children and young people being made in the context of online advertising and overspending. Radical stuff. Finally this area has been recognised as being within the ambit of online child protection.

It doesn’t stop there. There is also a mention of the Commission’s intention to

…..propose a pan-European framework for electronic authentication that will enable the use of personal attributes (age in particular) to ensure compliance with the age provisions of the proposed data protection regulation

The latter is a reference to Commissioner Reding’s draft regulations on data protection published earlier this year. In that draft a big play is made of age verification principally in relation to the privacy agenda. Link age verification with privacy and e-commerce and we are moving from radical to revolutionary.

It makes perfect sense. Privacy issues do not arise in a vacuum. Of course there are major aspects of the privacy debate that are not in any significant way tied in with e-commerce, the citizen’s relationship with the state being the most obvious example. But a great deal is intimately bound up with online business practices in one way or another.  I’m thinking in particular about how online behavioural advertising and location based services operate.

Keeping questions about age verification, privacy and e-commerce in separate compartments makes no sense at all in the real world. By contrast making the connections and linkages in the way the strategy documents does feels  like a major, liberating, breakthrough moment.

The blueprint

I mentioned how the road map assigns tasks either to the Commission itself, industry or Member States. So who is missing from that list? For one thing there is no mention of civil society or any other key players.

To be fair within the document there are many references to parents and children.  The strategy would nonetheless have felt more rounded if it had been imbued with a dynamic sense that parents, children and the NGOs that work with them could also be active agents or potential partners, not only benefiting from the activity being promoted but also helping the Commission deliver it.

I go back to a point I made earlier. Expecting some parts of industry to look at this with joy in their hearts is naive. Appealing to the good nature of CEOs, mixed with a little judicious sabre rattling about possible legislation, is what we have had up to now. But at the end of the day that approach turns this whole enterprise into a private, almost incestuous power play: a question of who will blink first. Big industrial beasts face off big bureaucrats.

Maybe that is what Commissioners believe is the reality. If it is, with the resources, above all lobbyists, at industry’s disposal, always ready to play into an ever present potential to stir up anti-Brussels sentiment in the media in Member States, or mix it in the European Parliament, I wouldn’t bet the farm on the outcome.

Thus I have no doubt the Commission needs to find ways to build real alliances within wider society, alliances which will help it achieve the objectives it has set itself, alliances that will help Member States feel they want to join in as enthusiastic collaborators. Against such a background there has to be a constructive way in which Members of the European Parliament, NGOs and other social institutions can be made part of the project. Leaving them on the sidelines as spectators or passive recipients of Euro bounty is a big mistake, or at any rate a major lost opportunity.

Given the EU’s current preoccupations, dealing with the economic meltdown, the crisis with the single currency, rows over budgets, I don’t underestimate the difficulty of doing that. But the first step has to involve recognising it is the right way to go.

Kindle – porn slips in under the radar

 

My wife and I often used to set off on holiday with a suitcase each of clothes and a third one of books which typically weighed more than the other two combined. Not any more. Two “e-book readers” do the trick, in our case Amazon’s Kindles. My Kindle is about the size of a small paperback, is only a few millimetres thick, weighs ounces not pounds and fits neatly into a side pocket of most of my jackets. It can carry up to 3,000 tomes although I have yet to reach 100.

I am totally hooked on this wonderful gadget. Discovering that I could have documents sent to it via email was a facility I thought might also be useful but in fact for me it rarely is. Still it’s always there as a backup should I ever be without a mobile or a laptop.

Parents buy Kindles for their kids

Hoping to encourage the habit of reading large numbers of parents have been buying Kindles for their children. I know of at least one very famous public school where almost every modern gizmo is frowned upon, but not the Kindle. It is applauded.

Kindles are internet enabled. They can connect either using built in WiFi or 3G. However, until recently I had thought the slender slab was only able to reach a single destination on the internet. That was Amazon’s “Kindle Store” where all you could then do was download books. Doubtless the great majority of solicitous Mums and Dads thought likewise. We were wrong. Wrong on several counts.

For one thing Kindles have Google’s search engine incorporated into them. When I entered a couple of not-hard-to-guess search terms I was immediately presented with a long list of porn sites. Clicking on them took me to their home pages. These contained images which were extremely graphic, hard core.

Not Technicolor but…..

The images were “only” black and white stills but I’m afraid the detail was unmistakeable and unavoidable. I made my virtual excuses and left. The Kindle would not play any of the many free pornographic videos that were also on offer. This is because the device can only handle a limited range of file formats but no way should any images of the kind I saw have been available via this route.  What was Amazon thinking? Perhaps it wasn’t.

I say this not least because the situation could have been very easily avoided. Google search comes in three flavours: no filtering, moderate filtering and “strict”.  Had Google search been set as strict no porn would have been able to get through and I would probably not be writing this blog.

No one could have any objection in principle to Kindle providing Google search on their e-book readers. I can see its potential usefulness. But in the circumstances I can see no justification at all for Google being on without it being set to strict by default.

What about other e-book readers?

I decided I ought to see if the Kindle was alone among e-book readers in allowing this kind of access. I didn’t want to have to buy all of them to take to my (non-existent) computer laboratory so I went into a major branch of PC World hoping to be able to check them out there.

Naturally I wore a false beard, sun glasses and a hat but I eschewed the dirty raincoat. It is such an obvious give away. Anyway, long story short, in PC World every device was locked down by filtering software or was running only demos. As a result, dear bibliophile, I was unable to see what the other e-book readers were capable of in their native state. It’s pretty obvious that too many men in false beards, sun glasses and hats have been going into PC World to undertake similar investigations but perhaps without the same virtuous intent. Well done PC World for taking steps to counter that even if, on this occasion, it defeated my mission as a super-sleuth.

Undaunted, I talked to the sales staff

Since I couldn’t complete my research in the way I originally intended I turned to speak to one of the store’s sales staff. I told him I was a parent thinking about buying an e-book reader for one of my children but I was keen to know beforehand if I needed to install any controls to block access to unsuitable adult content. The salesman assured me there was no need to have content controls of any kind on a Kindle or indeed on any of the other e-book readers because they were “only e-book readers”. PC World staff trainers please note.

A portal to porn?

When anyone thinks about a Kindle I’m guessing they tend to think about the generally wholesome benefits of books. OK, I know “books” can take you to many different places but what won’t spring into people’s minds when they think about a Kindle is a portable portal to porn. I mean it’s not as if there is a huge shortage of other ways of finding porn online. Does it also have to be bundled as part of a package and linked to a device which ostensibly has and is sold as having quite a different purpose? This is a clear example of porn slipping in under the radar.

If the availability of porn through a Kindle was more widely known parents might think twice about buying one and handing it over to a child. Thus, until this situation changes, at the very least Amazon needs to do a lot more to make sure parents who might be buying Kindles for their children are aware that this functionality exists.

Moreover, if Amazon won’t set the default on Google search to strict it should at least be possible for users to change the settings to that status. Right now it isn’t. Take a look at the Kindle user guide or Kindle’s general help page.  In it you will find nada. Zilch. Niente on the subject.

Amazon speaks

I emailed Kindle’s support desk to ask if, despite there being nothing in their manual, there might nonetheless be some way I could adjust Google’s settings. I got a reply which I’m guessing had not been carefully and individually crafted by a sentient human being who had been fully trained in the art of customer relations. My auto-respond electronic epistle simply ignored my question and advised me to use the other browser that is available on the Kindle. Not bad advice but not quite the point either.

I read the manual

I struggled on and did what no self-respecting techie would ever normally do (so please don’t tell anyone): I read the manual, the user guide referred to above. On page 10 it  tells you how to make images on your Kindle larger, but it doesn’t tell you how to make them disappear.  Hey ho.

Page 12 of the user guide is called “Getting more from your Kindle”. It tells you how to “customize” your Kindle’s settings. Sadly this “customization” does not extend to explaining how you might customize pornographic or other undesirable web sites out of the Kindle altogether.

I abandoned the user guide and resorted to direct action.  By messing around with my Kindle a bit more I did eventually discover a way to turn off access to images. This took a while and more than a little nerdy determination. It shouldn’t have. Information about how to do this ought to  be presented prominently.

However, while being able to turn off access to images is good with porn sites it is not only the images which give offence. A great deal of the associated text is highly objectionable, and most assuredly it is unsuitable for children.

Amazon’s 1-click system

When I was researching this story I came across a great deal of online discussion in the USA about Kindles providing access to inappropriate content. It was not so much the Google angle that people talked about over there, although that was mentioned in a small number of cases. In America people were getting hot under the collar about Amazon selling porn via the Kindle. Selling porn indiscriminately to anyone.

Selling books was Amazon’s original or core business. The Kindle is first and foremost a way of doing just that. The hardware is heavily subsidised precisely in order to entice people into buying one in the expectation they will subsequently start splashing the literary cash.

In order to help you part with your money more easily and quickly, in the set up process Kindles normally become linked to a method of online payment. Presumably in the case of a child the associated payment method would usually be a parent’s credit card although as far as I know Amazon does not verify its customers’ details so it could be a child with their own plastic passing themselves off as an adult.

Either way the card will be integrated into Amazon’s amazingly convenient 1-click payment mechanism. In this context, however, what this means in effect is that any kid with a Kindle can buy and instantly download anything that is on Amazon’s list of e-books. That list includes a great many volumes which are not in the least bit appropriate for children.

Did this not occur to Amazon? It is true that, in theory, to have an Amazon account and therefore to run a Kindle you are meant to be over 18. But the company must or ought to have known their hardware is in the hands of large numbers of minors. Realistically, as things are set up now, how can a typical parent supervise their child’s use of a Kindle?

Of course we all speak to our children about them needing our permission to do this or that, or about the importance of them talking to us before they embark on a particular course of action, but in real life it doesn’t always work out that way. Amazon should be helping parents not acting as co-conspirators in undermining their authority.

There was some chat in a number of US online forums I visited about disabling Kindle’s WiFi or 3G access, or de-registering the Kindle so nothing new could be bought, but these were put forward as inspired “work arounds” that people had conjured up themselves. It ought not to be that hard. At the very least Amazon should have anticipated that parents might like the option of disallowing the purchase of certain categories of books until their children reach a certain age or they judge them to be mature enough.

This sorry saga illustrates once again how hardware manufacturers and software developers far too often simply do not consider the child safety dimension of what they are doing. They don’t think things through, or if they do they come to entirely the wrong conclusions. Oddly enough, though, these lapses almost invariably err on the side of income maximization, for them that is. They rarely make a mistake which results in their revenues being reduced.

Kindle calamities

One person’s income maximization is someone else’s income minimization. You are never going to guess what has been happening! This too has been much discussed in the US. Yep, because a payment mechanism is more or less intrinsic to the operation of a Kindle, it seems some children, having found this out, have gone on major spending sprees which were only discovered after the event when their parents’ monthly credit card statement arrived or the bank rang up to tell them there was insufficient funds in their account to cover the credit card bill which had just been presented.

Maybe the parents concerned were a little slack to allow this to happen. As already mentioned, Amazon can properly point out that the Terms & Conditions for their accounts make plain that  only  persons over the age of 18 are allowed to be customers. But how hard would it have been for Amazon to think their way to a point where they acknowledge that parents buy Kindles for their kids and therefore that these kinds of things can happen? Could they not have come up with something or other to help parents avoid or mitigate the different types of excesses being discussed?

What is the scale of kids’ unauthorised covert online commerce?

In a blog I wrote last year I referred to a report published in 2010 which showed that kids between the ages of 7 and 16 in the UK had spent £64 million pounds online without their parents’ knowledge, typically through surreptitious use of a PayPal account or credit card. That was one in seven of all online transactions undertaken by youngsters in the age group. I’m guessing Amazon must be in there among the companies that benefited from this covert commerce.

What about other popular internet enabled devices?

Going back to my earlier theme while I was in PC World I decided to try  various of the new tablets that were on offer: iPads, Galaxy Tabs and so on. Very popular with kids and slowly usurping laptops. What were the default settings on these internet enabled devices?

Once more I found that PC World had installed filtering software on every one of them that was being displayed in their shop. Foiled again. My investigations were thwarted. Ten out of ten to PC World for thinking of that angle.

Very obviously if PC World had worked out that filtering ought to be turned on by default on the devices when they are offering them for sale this sort of makes the case for similar software being on by default on the very same objects when they actually sell them. I believe PC World is sympathetic to this point of view, or certainly they were at one stage, but of course it requires the hardware manufacturers to co-operate and with few exceptions hitherto we have seen little sign of them doing that. This must change.

It’s all about seamless safety

Which takes me finally to a theme I floated in my last blog: “seamless safety”. Parents should not have to worry when they buy any new internet enabled device for their children  that they need to start jumping through complicated hoops to render it as safe as it can be.

If a gadget can be connected to the internet the defaults should be family friendly, child friendly from the very beginning. Belt and braces, ISPs and WiFi providers likewise should make the internet connections they supply family friendly, child friendly by default. Yes the defaults on all or most devices and connections should be capable of being changed to allow adults to access any legal material. I am not in favour of censorship.

But I am even less in favour of commercially driven or any other kind of enterprise robbing children of their innocence by exposing them to some of the materials which are all too readily available in cyberspace.

In search of seamless safety

The emergence of “3G” was a hugely important milestone in the evolution both of mobile phones and the internet.

Before 3G it was theoretically possible, via a mobile phone handset, for people to access cyberspace or obtain a range of content and services directly from or via their network operator. But in practice there was comparatively little take up of either. The networks were slow and screens were small. 3G made everything faster, smarter, better. It prompted a flurry of innovation. Phones got neater, screens bigger.

Faster, smarter better

Everyone correctly anticipated that faster, smarter, better would mean more services, content and applications would be developed specifically for mobiles. More people would start using and consuming them. Including kids.

Long story short: children’s access to the internet had, up to that point, largely been channelled through computers which were in fixed places, typically the home, school or the library.  Whatever view one took of parents’, teachers’, librarians’ or others’ responsibility to supervise and support children’s use of the internet when they were on computers in static locations, going online via mobile phones made such notions redundant. Mobile phones are private, personal and portable. Every mobile network operator in the UK agreed more was needed and that it should work industry-wide.

This posed a challenge. Up to then in the UK network operators traditionally only collaborated on technical issues and market preparation activity. An exception had arisen in the mid 1990′s when they came together to respond to the Stewart Enquiry on alleged health effects. They co-funded independent research into the issue. The operators also worked together on texting and the evolving short codes market.

At the time all this was going on the UK’s flagship body for dealing with online child safety was the Home Office Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet. In 2002 the Chairman of the Mobile Data Association joined it. The following year negotiations got underway which led to the adoption of the “UK code of practice for the self-regulation of new forms of content on mobiles” (the Code).  Every mobile network signed up. The Code became operative in January 2004. It was also destined to make an important contribution to mobile-related policy across Europe (see below).

The mobile networks agree

Under the Code the networks agreed to do three things, each of which was then revolutionary in its own way.

First they all joined the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and started deploying the IWF list on their networks so as to block access to child abuse images.

Second, while the mobile phone companies rapidly expanded the range of branded and co-branded content and services which they themselves provided to their customers they also decided all of it had to be rated either as suitable for adults only or for everyone.

Obviously the UK’s mobile networks had no responsibility for or control over the generality of internet-based content or services. Nonetheless the operators took the view that they needed similar treatment i.e. internet-based content and services had to be classified as being suitable either for adults only or for everyone. To do this they deployed internet filtering programmes.

The third and final step involved the UK networks putting all adult sites, content and services, both their own and from the internet, behind what became known as an “adult bar”. Short codes which provided access to adult content or services also went in.

The adult bar was applied by default to all Pay As You Go phones. Overwhelmingly these are what children and young people use. With contract phones it is more complicated because the working assumption is that every contract phone owner is an adult. However, most of the mobile phone network operators in the UK decided to apply the adult bar by default to monthly accounts as well.

Thus, today, in Britain if you want to get at any of the services or materials behind the adult bar you first have to prove to your network operator that you are 18 or over. An individual wanting to have the adult bar raised does not have to say which type of adult content he or she is interested in. The bar is either all on or all off. Nobody can ask for access to child abuse images to be made available to them because in that case it is illegal and therefore strictly off limits.

Big round of applause for the UK’s mobile companies. Each of these were world firsts.

The EU wades in

In 2007 similar ideas were taken up in an EU-wide “European Framework for Safer Mobile use by younger teenagers and children”.  The provisions of this document were nothing like as specific or tight in relation to content and services accessible via mobiles from the internet, but the big step forward it did make was in respect of establishing a process for independently reviewing and monitoring implementation. We had never managed to get a similar agreement in respect of the UK’s Code although a one off review was carried out in 2008. Score one for Brussels.

So far three independent reports on the implementation of the EU framework have been produced. They show steadily increasing adoption of its provisions across the 27 Member States. Score two for Brussels.

How do you define what a mobile phone is these days?

Nothing stands still. We all now want access to all of our online content and all of the online services we normally use from anywhere and at any time, with equal facility across a range of internet enabled devices, probably using cloud-based services.

Mobile phones are now being replaced by smartphones. Smartphones are, in effect, mini computers which also incorporate the features of a telephone. Some smartphones are more powerful than leading edge desktop machines were only a few years ago. Smartphones have faster and better access to the internet than their predecessors. When 4G arrives the speed of access will step up another notch, a big notch.

However, the boundary between what is a phone and what is not a phone is becoming decidedly blurred. A wide range of handheld or easily portable devices that are capable of connecting to the internet are on the market. Add a programme like Skype and you have the potential, willy nilly, to turn almost any of them into a phone of sorts.

Some of these handheld or easily portable gadgets are very popular with children and young people. Think about laptops. The sale of desktop PCs is in secular decline as they and a range of other easy to carry devices take over. According to an Ofcom report (Table 26) back in 2010 already 42% of young people in the UK aged 15 or less accessed the internet at home via a laptop. In a later research report it was noted that less than a third (32%) of 18-24 year olds use a desktop computer to access the internet at home. The trend could not be clearer.

Think about iPads and other tablets, think about MP3 players and eBook readers. Think about games consoles produced by companies such as Sony and Nintendo. I saw a father of three teenagers interviewed on TV recently. He had counted twenty different devices in the family home, all which could access the internet. Most belonged to his kids. As the “internet of things” develops, so more and more objects, portable and otherwise, will be online doing something or other.

The common denominator which makes it possible for this wide range of handheld or easily portable devices to connect to the internet is that they have built-in or attachable WiFi. Some may or may not also have a SIM card inside them. Others might be able to make use of a broadband dongle but WiFi  is the invisible thread that brings them all together, opening up a doorway to countless virtual worlds.

Yet mobile phones remain special

Despite the fact that I say the boundary between what is and what is not a mobile phone is getting fuzzy at the edges, the small still easily-recognizable thing that we currently call a mobile phone, the gadget that children and young people carry about in their pocket or satchel, is still special and will be for a long time.

Mobiles are out there in vast numbers. Children and young people rank them among their most treasured possessions. Moreover mobile phones in the UK are covered by a Code, or in the EU by a framework, which expressly says or at any rate implies that by default the device will keep adult content and services out. This alone sets them apart.

The WiFi component in a child’s smartphone is therefore extremely important. It enables the handset to sidestep, thereby making completely redundant, all of the cleverness and money the network operator has invested in keeping its user safe. The promise of security evaporates in an instant.

And taking that sidestep is so easy to do. All it requires is for the handset user to log on to a public WiFi access point or “hot spot” as they are more commonly called. Typically access will be free and have zero or minimal formalities.

Nobody knows exactly how many publicly accessible hot spots are scattered around the country. Perhaps Ofcom could start mapping them in the same way that it is does mobile phone cells? BT Openzone runs its own network of hot spots. It claims to have over 3.5 million of them but you have to be part of the BT FON network to obtain free access, which means it is not really free. Right now the number of truly free hot spots is unlikely to be as large as BT FON’s agglomeration but it may not be long before it is.

Who are the WiFi providers?

The main providers of free WiFi access to the public are companies that have no relationship at all with any mobile phone network. They are bound by no Code. At the moment it is extremely unlikely they will be running any kind of filtering. Normally they will be high street retailers and companies that operate in airports, railway stations, bus stations and the like.

A provider will buy in a WiFi service from a relatively small number of WiFi suppliers. It’s seen as an extra service which the provider hopes will attract and help retain customers. Because the access is free it means, in effect, it is also anonymous. Even if there is a small charge or a requirement to buy something e.g. a cup of coffee, the usage will still probably be, for all practical purposes, anonymous. As soon as the word “anonymous” hoves into view, in this context at least, certain kinds of problems will not be far behind.

A small number of providers of publicly accessible WiFi hotspots, for example and notably the McDonald’s hamburger chain, understood aspects of this issue early on, at least in the UK. They asked their WiFi supplier to install an anti-porn filter. They did not like the idea of someone using internet access which they had provided to display pornographic images on any sort of screen while sitting next to a Mum and her two kids who had just popped in for lunch.

McDonald’s foresight does them great credit. O2 now runs the McDonald’s contract. In the press release announcing their engagement with McDonald’s O2 lists other companies and organizations that are now taking a similar view. Bravo!

Why would you choose to use WiFi?

If you have a modern 3G smartphone why would you choose to use WiFi instead? There are several possible answers to that question.

One is cost. Lots of mobile phone companies have deals which give you a large but limited amount of internet access as part of a price plan. Once you exceed that limit you pay. If you use a WiFi connection instead you will not be using up your quota. Children and young people can be extremely cost and budget conscious because their parents give them a set amount of pocket money. Once they grasp that a free alternative is available children and young people will be quite likely to use it.

Alternatively speed might matter. In many parts of the country the 3G network is becoming so overcrowded it sometimes slows down access times to a crawl. Defeats the whole point. WiFi is likely to be a lot faster. In fact in order to relieve congestion and improve speeds some mobile phone networks are understood to be deliberately shunting internet traffic off their 3G networks on to any locally available WiFi. Potentially this is problematic if the WiFi hotspot has no filtering on it. Whether or not the user would know they had momentarily gone off their usual network to be placed with a local WiFi provider is unclear. Presumably if they did not know, in practice, it would make no difference, although I am pretty sure people will be looking for reassurances on that point.

There again a person might opt for WiFi precisely because they want to escape their mobile phone company’s filters. However, only kids would have a reason to want to do that because if you are an adult you can get adult content anyway.

All providers of public WiFi should…..

I am not suggesting there should be a law or regulation making it compulsory for Wifi providers only to make available a family friendly service. If individual companies operating in a wholly adult environment want to provide adult content on their network self-evidently they should be free so to do. Alternatively companies providing WiFi access might want to offer a choice to their customers. If they did they ought also to develop age verification systems. Perhaps piggyback on the mobile phone networks’ existing databases of age verified customers?

I hope every WiFi supplier to companies that wish to become WiFi providers to the public will make clear that their default offering is family friendly and that no cost penalty or premium price attaches to choosing it. Being family friendly should not be an expensive optional extra.

The fact of internet access is important, not how it is acquired

From a parent’s or a teacher’s point of view, from the perspective of child protection, what matters is the fact of internet access, not how or via which device access is acquired. In “Do we have safer children in a digital world?”, published in March, 2010, Professor Tanya Byron makes a similar point at paragraph 4.9.

The focus on mobile phones remains crucially important because of children’s and young people’s heavy use of and strong attachment to them but it makes no sense at all to look only at mobile phones. Fixed line providers and device manufacturers have to be part of the same, overarching equation.

To put that slightly differently, the self-regulatory regimes governing access to content and services via mobile phones which we have in the UK and within the wider EU are obsolescent or at any rate they are starting to look decidedly dated. We need a new approach that works in the new conditions of widespread and growing wireless connectivity in which many different types of machines can be actors at any given moment.

Today WiFi is important. Tomorrow it will be über WiFi as other parts of the radio spectrum are released for commercial exploitation. In a world of the always-on internet seamless safety has to be the way to go. Parents would then know exactly what the position was at the off and would not have to learn, for twenty different internet enabled devices in their home, potentially up to twenty different ways of making them acceptably safe for their kids. Equally they would not have to worry quite so much that when their child took one of the portable internet enabled devices outside the home e.g. their smartphone, that they would instantly and inevitably be back in the Wild West.

If new arrangements of the kind I have outlined do not come into force it will slowly undermine the case for the UK’s and other European mobile phone networks carrying on doing what they are currently doing. The Codes and the framework will wither on the vine, fading into irrelevance.

In other parts of the forest we constantly hear calls for platform, technology and network neutrality. I agree with that. The baseline for every type of access to the internet should have child safety built in by default. If they are all in the same business no one segment of it should have to carry a greater or lesser regulatory burden than the other. I’m not saying everyone should have to “do child safety” identically, even less that they should have to do it in a manner prescribed by any Government or Governmental agency. But a widely agreed floor should be established. In a sense that brings me neatly back to my larger point. The importance of bringing fixed line internet access providers and device manufactures into the ball game so all bases are covered. In the UK we have made a start.

Active Choice revisited

Fixed line providers were discussed in the Bailey Review, published almost a year ago. The UK Government endorsed a proposal that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should provide their customers with an “Active Choice” in terms of online child safety. ISPs’ subscribers will be presented with an unavoidable screen which would force them to decide whether or not to opt-in to using filtering and child safety tools that would be provided at no extra cost.

The UK’s “Big Four” ISPs, Talk Talk, Virgin, Sky and BT, got together to produce a statement setting out the broad principles of how they intend to implement their interpretation of Active Choice. The successor to the Home Office Task Force, the UKCCIS Executive Board, is monitoring progress on implementation of the statement and doubtless will be looking to other, smaller ISPs to join in.

There was an early result. Talk Talk were out of the traps before the ink on the Bailey Review was dry. They announced the commencement of their implementation of Active Choice in May, 2011. We have still to see how, in practice, Virgin, Sky and BT will implement their versions but already storm clouds are gathering. A growing number of people seem to think the Active Choice opt-in model for child safety, while a welcome step in the right direction, is still far too feeble. They want child safety to be on by default. They want people to have to opt out of child safety if they want to opt-in to adult content. In other words they want a system rather like that described above as run by the UK’s mobile phone network operators.

Baroness Howe of Idlicote introduced the Online Safety Bill to the House of Lords earlier this month (April, 2012). If passed it would give effect to just that sentiment but sadly only in relation to pornography, not the full range of adult content. Somewhat bizarrely Lady Howe’s Bill would also make it mandatory for all the mobile networks to carry on doing what they have been doing voluntarily for over eight years.

There are also provisions in the Baroness’s Bill in relation to age verification but these are insubstantial because they refer only to ISPs’ and mobile networks’ “subscribers”, meaning the persons who pay the bills. It says subscribers must be verified as being over 18. If they are paying the bills almost by definition they are bound to be. If Lady Howe had specified “users” rather than subscribers that would have been an entirely different and more complicated kettle of fish. Perhaps an amendment will be moved to that effect as the Bill goes through Parliament but even so many will see its exclusive focus on pornography as its core and fatal weakness.

Close on the heels of Lady Howe’s Bill Claire Perry MP has announced the results of her Parliamentary Enquiry. Among many other things she too is asking for Active Choice to be looked at again. Incidentally Perry also picks up on the point about the absence of a child safety policy on WiFi. Add to the dynamic duo of Howe and Perry one David Cameron. Our Prime Minister. He is constantly sending out the message that internet safety for children is a dearly held personal priority. Then we have Commissioner Kroes. No one should think for a minute that the pressure is going to let up any time soon.

Active Choice+

The Bailey Review, which had a very much wider canvas than the internet and technology, did not discuss WiFi, or if it did it was only indirectly. Fixed line was its major target and perhaps tactically that was the right decision at the time. However, what that means is that, as presently constructed, Active Choice does nothing to address the challenges thrown up by public WiFi. It is therefore not so much a case of bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, it’s more akin to failing to realise that there are now large numbers of kangaroos in our midst. The horses will be fine if they stay at home but the ‘roos are everywhere. Eventually even the horses will learn to jump like ‘roos then…..actually I can feel this metaphor breaking down. I’m going to abandon it. I hope you get the point.

Any new initiative which addresses the fixed line environment in the home is marvellous and necessary, but on its own it is not sufficient. We need Active Choice+. This must embrace WiFi. Happily UKCCIS accepts this point. Ministers have established a working group specifically to look at it. That working group needs to crack on and the EU needs to pick up the issue as well.

The devices themselves

There could be considerable further scope for attaining the principal objective set out in this blog – achieving seamless safety – by another, or rather an additional route. Hardware is the third key variable. Manufacturers of internet enabled devices who wanted to sell them in the EU should be required to meet minimum safety standards. These could be prescribed under the EU’s R&TTE Type Approval processes and draw on pre-existing standards work to which several agencies have contributed.

I am conscious that this a regulatory rather than a self-regulatory path, but in this particular instance I do not believe there is any alternative. It’s the nature of the beast. 

And a final WiFi twist

Talk Talk’s approach to Active Choice is upstream of the subscriber’s home. It sits on their network. As a result any and all devices within the family home that might connect via Talk Talk’s domestic WiFi router will be covered. Ten out of ten. Talk Talk were the first major company to go in that direction within the UK. And it is not an unimportant direction even if one of the reasons is less obvious.

Every household with WiFi broadcasts a signal. That signal can be picked up by anyone within up to three hundred metres who has an internet enabled device. If the owner of the router has not made it secure and it provides full access to the internet then the best laid plans of mice and men will have gone awry yet again.

Talk Talk’s routers are locked down by default, as all routers should be, but even if someone standing on the pavement was to crack the code, or more likely had been given it by an accomplice within, if the family friendly settings were turned on at network level the surfing options would be constrained by the parameters the parents had set.

The good news is it is widely expected that Virgin, Sky and BT will follow Talk Talk’s lead to some degree. I doubt those three companies will put their family friendly settings on their networks but they may incorporate them into a new breed of wireless routers and so will achieve a similar effect. The problem of rogue, home based open routers or cracked routers acting as a magnet for every kid in the neighbourhood should vanish soon enough. However, lest we forget, Talk Talk is not (yet) a major commercial supplier or provider of WiFi on the High Street. Sky and BT, on the other hand, most certainly are.

The rise of Apps

People have tended to think of Apps as programmes rather than content consequently they have not received the degree of scrutiny from the child protection community which it turns out they deserve. There are concerns not just around what some Apps do, but also how they do it. How transparent are they? And not just in relation to kids. Stories of rogue Apps ripping off people’s personal data are legion. These sorts of Apps should never have got into the Apps Stores to begin with. They pose a threat to everyone who downloads them but perhaps above all they pose a threat to kids if their personal data get into the wrong hands.

Various age rating systems for Apps are now being used or promoted, for example the one being sponsored by the US-based Entertainment Software Rating Board.  Several of the individual mobile platforms run their own. However, it seems that some of these age rating systems, rather than being independently judged, are based on the individual publisher’s own assessment. Apparently for the same Apps variations are creeping in between different platforms and Apps Stores. That can’t be right.

I have not looked at how any of the age rating systems work in any detail but I do know that we are going to have to find a satisfactory way of bringing Apps into the online child safety conversation. Otherwise we will not only have kangaroos running loose, we’ll also have……….(suggestions on a postcard please to the usual address).

Once more to Brussels

Finally, to underline the several references to the EU throughout this blog, it seems clear to me that while the UK Government intends to make moves on WiFi the current CEO Coalition working at EU level somehow somewhere needs to get a grip of this too.

The most obvious Coalition working group that could take responsibility for the topic is the one on parental controls. I appreciate this is a big project which probably could never be completed within Commissioner Kroes’s tight timeframe. But at the very least it should be referenced and markers put down.

More than just a common language

 

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted in 1989. It is a hugely important international Treaty. To quote from UNICEF’s web site

Built on varied legal systems and cultural traditions, the Convention is a universally agreed set of non-negotiable standards and obligations.

Children’s rights and child welfare organizations across the world look to the CRC’s 54 articles as the cornerstone of their work. The Convention was several years in gestation but when the final text went to the UN General Assembly it was adopted unanimously.

According to UNICEF UK

The CRC is the most complete statement of children’s rights ever produced and is the most widely-ratified international human rights treaty in history. 

The USA has not ratified the Convention

If a country ratifies a Treaty of this kind it normally means one of two things: either the Government of the country believes they already meet or exceed the legal or other standards set out in it, or in effect  they give an undertaking to do whatever is necessary to bring themselves into line. The UK ratified the CRC in 1991.

As of today only two countries have not ratified the CRC. One is Somalia. In that case it is not hard to work out why. The other is the USA. The US has signed the Treaty, which normally indicates an intention to ratify, but formal ratification has not yet taken place. That’s less easy to figure.  Or rather it was until I read a marvellous essay by a Harvard Law Professor.

In “Ratification by the United States of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Pros and Cons from a Child’s Rights Perspective” Elizabeth Bartholet discusses a range of issues surrounding non-ratification. However, for me, the principal value of her piece was in terms of the light it sheds on a number of things which have puzzled me over the years concerning US policy and attitudes towards child protection and child welfare, both online and off.

Consequently the main focus of this blog is not the CRC itself. Rather here I look at the wider context, the bigger picture of current US policy in the field. Bartholet’s article paints that picture very skillfully. That said we should note that Professor Bartholet’s strongly-stated conclusion is that the USA should proceed to ratify the Convention

…..ratification would make a major difference. It would enable the United States to better promote children’s rights abroad, and it would push the United States to develop its domestic law in dramatically new directions that empower children.

We should also record that while the USA has not ratified the substantive CRC it has signed and ratified both of its Optional Protocols: one on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the other on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. This is a little bit back to front but it is definitely not unprecedented.

The two countries

When I have talked to American colleagues about aspects of online child protection policy and child welfare generally I occasionally had a sense that our outlooks were extremely close but somewhere along the line we were failing to connect. There was an un-articulated invisible barrier that kept getting in the way. Bartholet explains all.

George Bernard Shaw once said the UK and the USA were

…two countries divided by a common language…

It seems there is more to it than that. As Bartholet puts it

…..various CRC principles differ powerfully from current (US) law…..

Now we ought not to get too carried away by this bald description of the jurisprudential status quo in the USA.  Bartholet points out it is very obviously not the case that every country which has signed the CRC has achieved nirvana for children and this contrasts sharply with the USA where all sub-18s are locked into a cycle of unending privations.

To put that slightly differently, Bartholet plainly believes many signed-up countries ratified the treaty as a purely cosmetic or political exercise with precious little follow through. Against that, in the unsigned US the great majority of children undeniably enjoy many of the fruits of the intentions behind the CRC. So signing or not signing is not in and of itself what makes the difference. It’s the political will and wherewithal that matter. Some countries have it, some don’t. Signing up to the CRC may be evidence of an intention but it is not conclusive proof.

In the US parents’ rights rule

Bartholet is clear that in relation to bringing up children there is more than one important difference between US laws and those prevailing in lots of other countries. Certainly when comparing the US with the UK and several European nations a singular point of departure is the rights of parents’ vis-a-vis the rights of their children. There seems little doubt this is one of the principal explanations for the delay in the USA joining the club.

To quote Bartholet

Current U.S. law provides children little in the way of rights. Instead, the emphasis is on parents’ rights to make decisions related to their children and on states’ rights to protect children’s best interests, with states limited in their ability to do so by parents’ rights………

US law allows the state to protect children but does not impose…..a constitutional duty to protect children……

Often US law forbids any consideration of children’s interests until adults’ interests have been addressed and given priority…..

Bartholet goes on to explain that this position is most likely rooted in a strongly-held belief that parents are normally going to be the best protectors of their children’s interests. So far so uncontroversial. But perhaps too this sentiment gets mixed up with shadows of a traditional or more ancient American mistrust of Government in general? Some Americans think that any shift towards a stronger notion of children’s rights would inevitably lead to greater official intervention in family life and this would not normally work out best for the child or anyone else.

The implication of this line of reasoning is that ratification of the CRC by the US may be a long time coming. Signing would, in effect, signal an intention by the Federal Government to challenge long-standing cultural attitudes. Not out of the question. It has happened before more than once.

But absent powerful supporting external pressures or bi-partisan support on the Hill, both of which seem unlikely, I guess any occupant of the White House who might be minded to go this way would first have to make a political decision about whether or not to start a fresh or gratuitous battle to win it, on top of all the other stuff they cannot avoid. Hmmmm.

Children’s rights?

Bartholet emphasises that children do have some constitutional rights in the US e.g. in relation to speech, juvenile justice, protection against search and seizure yet seemingly the Supreme Court has been cutting back on these

…..ruling even in these areas children’s rights are weaker than adults’ rights and are subject to control both by parents and the state.

Down to cases

The differences in approach are not just theoretical, with no tangible or practical differences in outcomes for children. They have produced real life results which many Europeans would struggle to comprehend.

In Wisconsin v Yoder (1972) the Supreme Court upheld the right of an Amish family to keep their children out of High School despite the fact that there were state laws which pointed in the opposite direction. Part of the argument before the Supreme Court was about whether or not the child’s views on the matter should be taken into account. A majority of the Court said they did not have to be because

…..any such effort might conflict with parents’ rights to control the religious upbringing of their children. 

In DeShaney v Kramer (1989) a father beat his child so badly the child went into a coma and ended up with permanent disabilities. The mother sued the state on the child’s behalf arguing that the state had failed in its duty to protect the child. The Court held there was no violation of the child’s right to be protected because no such right existed whereas the father did have a right to be free from “undue intervention”.

In Re Guardianship of Philip Becker (1981) involved the parents of a Downs Syndrome child who had been left in institutions all his life. Philip developed a heart condition which medical experts felt needed an operation to give him any sort of comfort and reasonable life expectancy. The parents refused to give their permission. For years the operation did not happen.

There was a family who used to take Philip into their home for regular visits. In the end a judge was persuaded to appoint the weekend carers as the child’s guardians. As guardians they immediately gave permission for the operation to be performed.

The three P’s of the Convention

Bartholtet tells us the CRC embodies three concepts of rights which have the potential to effect radical change in America, and these are key reasons why she supports ratification.

The rights are listed as Participation, Provision and Protection and in each instance Bartholet makes a convincing case to show how things might be improved domestically if they were enacted into US law. She expresses one major disagreement with the CRC and that is in relation to adoptions, more particularly inter-racial adoptions and international adoptions. It is beyond the scope of this blog to explore her arguments in that regard but they have few implications for online policy.

Parents, families and children’s rights

I am pretty sure every children’s organization and Government in Europe would acknowledge the overwhelming importance of parents and families when it comes to questions which touch upon the upbringing of children. However, I am equally sure that they would above all else put the best of interests of the child at the core of their primary concerns.

Normally the best interests of the child would of course be identical to and co-terminus with the interests of the child’s parents and family, but that cannot always be guaranteed, as the Supreme Court cases referred to above aptly illustrate.

In the online space

How do these evident differences in jurisprudence and attitudes get reflected in policy in relation to online child protection? Again it would be wrong to say there is an enormous aqueous chasm which separates the two sides of the pond. Yet there is little doubt in my mind that in the UK, in many other European countries and at EU level, where the best interests of the child stand centre stage, there is a much greater willingness for the state to intervene because it accepts its over-arching responsibility to ensure all is well for children in every part of their lives, including the online one.

The US Federal Government and Congress are global leaders for the work they do or for the support they give to the fight against online crimes against children. This is evidenced both through their funding  of NCMEC and the work of the Department of Justice, especially the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, the FBI and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Other Federal agencies such as Homeland Security and the Postal Inspection Service are also a major force both domestically and globally. You hear about the work of US law enforcement agencies all the time. Officers turn up at INTERPOL meetings and the like and make important contributions based on their unique knowledge and experience.

However, once you step out of the narrow but clearly vital field of law enforcement you would be hard put to think of anything of comparable stature. Individual companies from the US do sterling work. No question. There are also some extremely energetic and highly regarded NGOs. But at equivalent major international conferences or events where online safety is being discussed one rarely encounters officials from other parts of the Federal Government or from any state administrations.

CRC signatories accept the legitimacy of Governmental responsibility to do more than simply enforce the law. They acknowledge that Government must step in if parents and families are failing. Children have a right under the CRC to grow up healthy and educated. Governments have the final responsibility to ensure they do. Many Americans would hesitate before accepting this idea, or they would straight out reject it. Ratifying the CRC will not be easy for any Administration.

Not all parents and families are the same

Looking at this topic more broadly we need to get some sort of handle on the potential size of the problems that lie behind the concerns being expressed. We all know that, in every country and at all levels of society, families can be imperfect institutions. If it were otherwise we would, for example, hardly need children’s departments within social services or anything similar.

Sadly there are some families, some parents, for whom no amount of education or awareness-raising is going to make the slightest bit of difference to their behaviour, either generally or specifically in relation to their kids. That applies equally both in the real world and in the online world.

Thus, to maintain an unvarying mantra about parental or family responsibility is effectively to say to the children within such families

Tough. You’re on your own. Best of luck. 

That is not civilized. It is tantamount to saying

Devil take the hindmost

I regret to say you come across this kind of thinking in many jurisdictions. Normally it is expressed in a (typically silent) belief that kids in these problem families are doomed anyway. They are the ones who are going to end up in prison or involved in gangs, will be blighted by teenage pregnancies, be unemployed and unemployable, the whole nine yards. So what’s the point?

The point is because they are children. They deserve a break and the adult world has an obligation to provide them with one whenever and wherever it can. That includes in relation to the internet. No one in the internet industry, none of us anywhere, can neatly cordon off cyberspace and say it’s down to everyone else to sort out the societal issues which create or sustain problem families or the medical or other issues which lie behind various children’s difficult behaviours. The internet is fully integrated into young people’s lives. It is both a cause and an effect. There is no hiding place or responsibility bypass available for anyone.

How many kids are we talking about?

How large is this group of children? How many families are borderline or actually ineffective?

In the UK we have a substantial amount of data which give us a clue as to the potential size of the group where challenges may arise either because the children themselves are known to the authorities to exhibit a range of difficult behaviours or their families are known to be chaotic for other reasons.

According to the NSPCC there were 50,552 children on child protection registers or were the subject of child protection plans in the UK in 2011. The NSPCC explains

Child protection plans or child protection registrations are not a measure of the incidence of maltreatment but do give some indication of the scale of the problem by providing figures for the number of children who are judged to be at risk of significant harm. However, research indicates that abuse and neglect are both under-reported and under-recorded. (bold letters added by me for emphasis)

The great majority of children referred to on the registers or in the plans are sub-16.

Now obviously there is no necessary link between simply being on the register and being vulnerable to any of the several risks children might encounter on the internet. To establish the degree of correlation and causality would probably require a great deal of further research. My point is that these children are unambiguously in personal or family situations which inspire little confidence in the parents’ ability to sit down and effectively communicate the finer points of netiquette or provide them with regular support and appropriate supervision.

It has been suggested in the past that before an internet-enabled device could be brought into a house with children, or given to a child, the parents had to sit some kind of test to prove they understood (a) what they were doing and (b) accepted their continuing obligations in relation their children’s usage. I can see an awful lot wrong with this idea but there is a tiny bit of it which I quite like.

Might there be more children?

Are there any children who do not appear on the at risk registers but nonetheless might be considered vulnerable? Definitely. The Department for Education produced a series of statistics for the year 2010. It is called “Children in Need in England”. They postulate that out of a total population of 12 million 0-18 year olds there were 375,900 children in need at 31st March, 2010.

At a conference I attended where these figures were being discussed a much larger number of children were identified as living in households with alcoholic parents or where domestic violence was known to be a regular occurrence or where a child was to some degree or other caring for a parent with mental health problems. Again not necessarily indicators of complete ineffectiveness in every area of parenting but hardly encouraging.

Children with “Special Educational Needs” (SEN) is probably far too wide a category to be all that useful in a discussion of this type but according to the Department for Education

In January 2011, some 224,210 (or 2.8 per cent) pupils across all schools in England had statements of SEN. This percentage has remained unchanged in recent years.

Numbers aren’t everything

I’m not sure this is or ever should be about any kind of utilitarian trade off. Just as we have constitutions and laws to entrench and protect minority interests and rights so we have instruments such as the CRC which make it clear we have responsibilities to each and every child, not just those blessed with good parents.

How far is it reasonable to bend policy for the majority in order to do the best we can to safeguard the interests of a vulnerable minority? Whichever way you look at it the percentage of children in need of extra care and attention will be small, but the numbers will be large. Too many human beings to ignore, particularly when it is widely accepted these official data always understate the true size of the problem. We just do not know how wide the penumbra of vulnerability extends beyond what the bare facts state or imply. And things change over time for each child.

We do know, from the UK police, that substantial numbers of the children who have become victims of online crimes, or who have been injured in other ways because of activity on the internet, were never on any at risk register, had no special educational needs and did not come from any of the stereotypical “problem family” backgrounds. Indeed they were “not known” to the authorities for any reason at all. Some were, most were not.

It’s probably the same in many countries

Whatever way the numbers finally shake down in the UK I would be surprised if, in relation to online risks, the proportions of potentially or actually needy children were all that different across much of the developed world. So the question we all have to ask is

Do we go the extra mile for these kids? And if we agree in principle that we should then how exactly do we do that without locking down the internet to a point where it becomes unattractive or unusable for everyone else? 

I have already made the case for the state having a responsibility to act to protect all children, to be the final backstop. But in the spirit of shared responsibility and multi-stakeholderism the rest of us have to pitch in also.

Back to the drawing board on the EU sales law

 

The Commission of the European Union is promoting a new regulation which, if passed, would create a “28^th jurisdiction” for the 27 Member States. Intriguing.

At the moment if you buy and sell something entirely within your own country then typically and fairly obviously your own laws of contract will apply. Why wouldn’t they? However, when you buy or sell anything internationally it is normal for the contract to spell out which country’s laws will be used to resolve any disputes, should they arise. Usually this is a decision the vendor takes although, in theory, it can be a matter for negotiation.

I think the phrase “in theory” is rather important here. Certainly if you are buying over the internet the notion that you might have a discussion about the applicable law is entirely fanciful. The vendor will choose the law, take it or leave it.

It appears many of us decide to leave it. We are reluctant to buy goods and services from businesses based in other EU Member States. This is because we are anxious that we will otherwise be caught out by the exotic and very different laws of the “funny foreigners”, as likely as not written in a language we cannot read or speak.

All a bit of a worry

Seemingly people believe that in some EU Member States if you buy cabbages after 12 noon on any Thursday in Lent the vendor can claim your first born. But which states and who or what is “Lent” some might ask? OK. That was a joke, but I hope you get the point. In order to avoid any risk of anything like that happening people continue to purchase their  cabbages locally. They might pay twice as much for them but it’s worth it for the resulting peace of mind.

According to the Commission’s estimates trade worth an extra 26 billion Euros could be generated by dismantling these kinds of perceived or actual barriers to intra-Community trade. In a survey 71% of European companies said, if they could choose, they would use a single European contract law for all cross-border sales to other EU countries.

Simple idea

The Commission’s simple idea to address this challenge was to create the 28th: a set of laws governing the sale of goods and services which could work on an EU-wide basis. Businesses will be able to choose to opt in to these laws in preference to their own local or anyone else’s national laws governing contracts.

Customers from another country thinking about buying something would be reassured, so the theory goes, because there will be certainty about the relevant rules. At a very practical level these rules would be available in every EU language. Any citizen who can read one could check out the material terms for themselves. Nobody would have to pay lawyers’ fees just to make sure there is nothing in there about their first born or Lent.

Anyway I can see the logic of the Commission’s arguments. I can see how such a proposal might help perfect the single market and stimulate free trade. The lawyers in many jurisdictions might not like it but I’ve already said enough about why I’m in favour.

It’s meant to be a model law as well

Seemingly a subsidiary purpose of the new contract law the EU is devising is that it could act as a model law or benchmark of some kind which different jurisdictions might borrow from or adapt, either as a whole or in part.

I’m afraid if I could vote against the proposals in their present form I would.  What is being suggested is a long way from being perfect in my book. The draft does not recognize some pretty obvious dangers to children which, absent any countervailing measures, are inherent in any projected increase in transnational commerce.

A question of age

The Article 29 Working Party has discussed the position of children in relation to data privacy and data collection practices in several papers which it has published down the years. In 2009 in WP 163(para 4) the Working Party said that it

…..encourages further research on how to address the difficulties surrounding adequate age verification and proof of informed consent…..

However, the Working Party fell short of recommending the adoption of a single EU-wide age standard for these purposes. I’m told everyone assumes that such a move would rub up against deep seated cultural sensitivities although I have never seen this documented or discussed at length anywhere.

EU Commissioner Reding seems willing to jump in where the Article 29 Working Party feared to tread. In her proposed new data protection Directive, at Article 8,  13 will become the new EU-wide minimum age, below which any company providing online services will need to obtain parental consent before collecting any personal data from a child.

But what about the question of age when it comes to commerce, 28th or otherwise? For a start I’m not sure anyone in the Commission knows what the spread of relevant ages are within EU Member States in relation to engaging in various types of commercial activities. They certainly didn’t the last time I asked.  Admittedly that was a few years ago. I wish I had the resources to gather in these data myself, but I don’t.

A convergence around 18?

I suspect there may be more of a convergence in relation to age and commerce than many people suspect. 18 is probably the most commonly adopted age standard. It applies almost everywhere for things like alcohol, tobacco, gambling, weapons and so on. Of course there are several other age points which are relevant for these purposes e.g. in the UK we have legally defined restrictions which are tied to the ages of 12, 15, 16 and 17.

In the UK breach of the rules relating to sales of some of the items governed by the age laws can result in either criminal or civil sanctions, or both.

Not so difficult when you can see the person in front of you

Before the arrival of the internet there was generally, at least in principle, little difficulty in enforcing these provisions. The person wanting to buy the product or service would normally be standing in front of you. If you had any doubt about their age you would ask for proof and if the person could not provide it the transaction would be halted. When selling over the internet this approach is simply a non-starter.

Many companies in many national jurisdictions have been struggling to find solutions to this age verification problem in relation to online sales made and completed entirely within their own borders. It is not hard to see how anything they might put in place at a company or national level could be completely undone, or at any rate substantially undermined, were transnational trading in age restricted goods and services to get going on any appreciable scale.

Kids have their own methods for paying for things online

An increasing number of children and young people, perfectly legally and properly, have their own independent means of paying for items online and offline. So for example country A allows the sale of aerosol spray paints to persons aged 14 or above. Country B specifies 17. Can companies in country A lawfully sell spray paints to 14 year olds in country B?

Conflict of laws

The general rule is that in the event of any conflict of laws the law of the purchaser’s or receiving country should prevail. But in relation to matters of this kind how would a company in country A know or be able to find out what the relevant law or provisions were in country B and how would they be able to check the age of a purchaser in country B?

Thus before the Commission goes charging off deliberately seeking to increase international trade it ought to have an answer to questions of this type. When I enquired I got a very dusty brush off. I was pointed to the Commission’s  explanatory paper and to the substantive proposal especially paragraphs 27 and 28 of the recital (pp 19 & 20).

These paragraphs indicate an intention to side step the issue. In paragraph 27 they say, for example,

All the matters of a contractual or non-contractual nature that are not addressed in the (the proposed new law) are governed by the pre-existing rules of the national law….. or any other relevant conflict of law rule. These issues include legal personality, the invalidity of a contract arising from lack of capacity…..

The question of a person’s age is about their “capacity”. In other words the draft regulation the Commission is proposing will not take a stand on the question of age related commerce. And just in case you were in any doubt, in paragraph 28 the following appears

The (proposed new law) should not govern any matters outside the remit of contract law…..for example, information duties which are imposed for the protection of health and safety or environmental reasons should remain outside the scope…..

Thus the Commission brings forward a draft new law to promote more international trade but then says it cannot be held responsible for any of the plainly foreseeable undesirable consequences. Am I missing something somewhere?

If, or rather when, kids from country B find out, as they surely would, that it was so easy to ignore their local law, and get the items delivered to their homes by a company based in country A what do you suppose they will do? Parents, school janitors, park keepers, shop owners and the police in country B will be furious. Meanwhile the vendor in country A enjoys bigger profits drawn from this extra, illicit trade.

Law enforcement attitudes

I doubt that international extradition warrants will apply to the sale of spray paints to under age purchasers. It is quite likely that whoever had to fill in the relevant forms will just decide the cost and the paper work involved is disproportionate to the benefit likely to be gained by transporting a recalcitrant seller of spray paints across the frontier. In other words the illegal sale of spray paints, and its consequences, will slip into the background noise of modern life and we will all just have to learn to live with it. Now think about the position if the sale was not of spray paints but of some of the other age restricted items I have mentioned.

A bold proposal

For these sorts of reasons I hope people will lobby for a clause to be inserted in the new law which specifically refers to the transnational sale of products and services which are controlled by reference to the age of the person intending to buy them. Such a clause could be in two parts:

 1. Instructing the Commission, at the very least, to compile, publish and maintain a list of all products or services which are the subject of any kind of legally prescribed age-based restriction relating to their sale in any and all EU Member States.  In the UK we have only about 30 such items in total. I don’t imagine many other states will have very much larger lists so this ought not to be too difficult for a body like the Commission.

2. If the Commission wished to go a step further it might then think about creating a legal obligation on anyone trading transnationally in products or services on that list to have regard to the relevant law in the receiving country. It could even take another step and oblige all companies that trade transnationally in any item on the list to demonstrate that they had put in place systems to enable them to comply with the new rule.

If the Commission wished to be even bolder it could even think about introducing a licensing scheme of some kind i.e. to trade transnationally in any product or service on the list the vendor would require prior approval. Such a licence would only be available to companies which could show they had systems to ensure they were not breaking the law in the receiving country

An alternative measure might be to disregard all the national rules on age restrictions and establish a single list of items the transnational sale of which would be restricted on an EU-wide basis.

I imagine such a “Brussels list” would include all those items currently restricted in every Member State to people who are 18+.  Alcohol, tobacco, gambling and weapons are the most obvious first candidates. There may be others.

There is no logical reason why we should not also add to the list items which are tied to ages other than 18 e.g. certain classes of video games or movies. However, here we have to recognise that, at the moment, there could be substantial practical barriers. Unlike with adults the relevant online databases of sub-18s simply do not exist.  This is not to say there would not be challenges with the 18+ category but they will be minor in comparison.

If there is a better or different way of achieving the ends I have described in this blog please let me know.  In the meantime I guess the message to the Commission is clear: by all means find new ways to promote transnational trade within the EU, but make sure you cover all the bases. So far you haven’t.