Parents should think twice before buying advanced, high-tech mobile phones for their children without blocking devices, the better to keep the new technology from drawing the kids "into the seedy world of Internet porn" and "unsuitable online chatrooms," various experts told the London Observer.
"Safeguards are now being drawn up by the mobile phone industry to cover high-tech handsets which allow users to get online from their mobiles, rather than having to log on to a computer," the paper said, including the blocking devices.
British awareness of unblocked mobile access became heightened by the recent case of a teen girl seduced by a 46-year-old man she met online through her mobile phone, the paper said. The man, Philip Bugler, was sentenced to four years in prison.
"A parent has to be aware that if they give a child of 12 or 13 years old one of the latest models of phone, which has got WAP access or whatever, what it is that they are giving them," Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum chairman Jack Wraith told the Observer. "If you said to a parent there is a red light district around the corner, they would make sure that their kids didn't walk through it and this issue is not really different."
Minister of E-Commerce Stephen Timms told members of Parliament last week the British government and mobile industry were working together on a code of practice to make sure "access by minors to inappropriate or illegal material is as hard as it is via any other medium," the paper added. Charles Farrar
