Industry co-operation

Voluntary codes of conduct, the law, and our stakeholder dialogue inform our practices on responsible marketing and the wider challenges of online child protection, including cyber-bullying.

We are members of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and sit on its funding council. The IWF seeks to tackle illegal online content in the UK and internationally, with a particular focus on images of child abuse.

How the IWF works

The Internet Watch Foundation is a self-regulatory body supported by Government and works in partnership with online service providers and police to combat child sexual abuse. It upholds UK law by facilitating the reporting of potentially illegal content online, and when content is in fact illegal, acting to get it removed. Sites are assessed according to UK law, specifically the Protection of Children Act 1978.

IWF maintains a list of illegal internet sites, updated twice a day. This is used by O2 and other service providers block access to illegal content. Typically 50 new sites are added to the list each day.

While the UK is well regulated, abusive images can be hosted in other countries. To protect UK users, some service providers – including O2 - voluntarily agree to use the IWF list to restrict access by their customers.

IWF also passes details of content found to be illegal to the police via the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), to root out imaged of child abuse and their perpetrators.

This helps to:

• Reduce the number of occasions when innocent users might inadvertently access traumatic and unlawful images.
• Diminish the victimisation of children by restricting opportunities to view abuse.
• Disrupt the accessibility and supply of such content to those who may actively seek out such images.

We worked with other mobile operators in the GSM Association to create a new Mobile Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse which was launched in early 2008. The alliance will work at a global level to obstruct the use of the mobile environment by individuals or organizations wishing to consume or profit from child sexual abuse content.

The UK industry funds the Independent Mobile Classification Body (IMCB), an industry body that provides a classification framework for commercial content. We require that the framework is used by our third-party suppliers to self-classify their content, such that content that is suitable only for adults is classified as 18.

Through the UK Media Literacy Charter we have joined with many media, broadcasting and educational organizations to demonstrate our commitment to help educate and enlighten our customers about new media and encourage people to get the best from digital technology.

During the year we also collaborated with 14 leading mobile operators, mobile content, social networking companies and internet providers to develop Teach Today, an online resource to support teachers in encouraging children to use the internet and mobile technology responsibly and safely. Click here to visit www.TeachToday.eu.