Is Mobile Content Dangerous? Part 2
Friday, 04.01.2008
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Mobile content is extremely versatile and not always in the positive sense of the word. Visiting a home page of some popular site that offers mobile entertainment, one can find there a game under the name “Sex-Express” etc. You may say that erotic is not aggressive content? But it is for children. Theoretically, the access to such pages is given to adults only, but how can every visitor be checked? In practice it turn out impossible.
According to the association of mobile marketing, 70% of teenagers from 12 to 17 own a mobile device and use it not only for calling. Games, images and music are especially popular with them. At the same time, the market of erotic and porno-content (including mobile) is steadily growing. The story with the PC-based Internet repeats (for instance in the US porno-traffic reaches up to 80% of all traffic). The same with the mobile content, the number of individuals who are eager to make money on the fans of the “stuff” are multiple.
In the spring of 2007 the police of South Korea conducted a raid on the offices of the leading mobile operators and content-providers. They were searching for pornography and found so much that the printed copies of the found pornography occupied as many as 40 000 A4 pages.
At the other end of the Globe, in Europe, the society faced another awful consequence of total mobilization of school children. In December 2006 in two schools in Switzerland (Zurich and Steffisburg) horrible accidents happened. Students raped their male school mates and shot the video on their mobile phones and posted it in the Internet. As the consequence of the rising public concern, on February 6, 2007 (the Worldwide Internet Security Day) 15 leading European mobile operator signed a convention according to which they agreed to do their best to protect the youth from adult content. Nokia, for instance, has introduced a technology that is able to control and give access to adult content.
The mobile phone has given the modern human a certain degree of informational freedom, and the mobile content has painted that image with additional paints. In goes without saying, that freedom is responsibility for yourself and for the others. But we have to be always interested in the ways of making a mobile phone safe for our children.