Content Standards

As the data services available on mobile phones become more sophisticated, we face an increasingly tough commercial and corporate responsibility challenge in ensuring that we provide adequate safeguards to prevent vulnerable people, particularly children, from receiving and viewing adult content.

We take our responsibilities in this area seriously and the Content standards section within the O2 in Society web site details the work we have been doing ourselves and with other operators in our industry on this important issue, which concerns many of our customers and employees. Sensitive areas include pornography, gambling, chatrooms, dating services and violent video games. Increasingly, location-based services are raising concerns about privacy.

Overall responsibility for content standards resides with the Chief Executive, supported by our Corporate Responsibility Forum. Our work in this area is coordinated by the Content Standard and Child Protection team, which includes senior managers from products, technology, communications, regulatory, legal and other parts of the Company. They meet fortnightly to ensure that we put proper protections in place for the vulnerable whenever we launch new services.

This team also oversees our response to a joint Code of Practice drawn up by all the mobile phone operators in the UK to self-regulate content standards. It also manages our commitments under Project Shield. This project, which we aim to complete by the end of 2005, will see us roll out the necessary technology to allow parents to block adult content from their children’s phones and mechanisms to allow us to verify the age of a mobile phone user.