After a nationwide outcry over an incident that saw a Sydney grade school student showing classmates nude photos that he had downloaded onto his Internet-capable mobile phone, Sen. Helen Coonan called the medium a “pipeline for perversion.”
Coonan said the solution was to extend the nation’s Internet and TV content restrictions to include mobile devices.
Representatives from the mobile sector attending the Australian Interactive Media Industry Summit agreed that protecting children is vital, but said Coonan’s solutions would not work.
Scott Taylor, general manager of Hutchinson, a company that offers adult content on its network, said that content restrictions won’t work because mobile devices will soon have access to virtually any website in the world. As an alternative solution, Taylor suggested that the industry needed to educate parents on how to control access.
“It’s all about responsible delivery of content,” Taylor said. “But once you go off the portal it’s a different thing. It is our responsibility to educate users and parents to control access to content they should not see."
According to Jason Nealon of Optus, a mobile content portal, a parental control layer needs to be part of the mobile device to best protect children.