Net-enabled phones give concern
With the Net on the verge of going mobile on a large scale, there’s likely to be an upsurge in child pornography, warns UK charity group NCH.
"The scale of the problem has changed beyond recognition in just over a decade," states John Carr, the author of Child pornography, child abuse and the Internet.
"This increased demand has made child pornography into big business and the consequences for children in all parts of the world are horrifying.
"Offences being committed through chat rooms have also been rising steeply. We need to tackle these problems urgently. The internet is about to go mobile, and that could make a lot of things more difficult to prevent or detect."
In 2002, in a single day Operation Ore provided UK police with the names of 6,500 people who had bought child pornography from a single US web site," says NCH here.
Online child pornography is now big business and the involvement of organised crime in producing and distributing child pornography through the Internet means yet more children will be abused to create new images for them to sell, the report states.
Now, with the emergence of Net-enabled phones, rights groups face new concerns over supervision, tracking, and access, Carr is quoted as saying in an IDG News Service report here.
While parents are able to monitor their children’s Internet activity while at home, they have no way of supervising Net surfing habits on mobile phones, Carr says.
What’s more, young people are typically early adopters of new technology and are likely to be some of the first users of 3G handsets when they begin to arrive in full force in many European countries later this year, IDG quotes Carr as saying.
Access is another concern and NCH and other charity groups are calling for measures that will ensure that users accessing adult online content are at least 18 years old, says the report, adding:
"The industry needs to ‘find new technology-based solutions to help police and others in dealing with the new types of Internet misuse that are emerging,’ the NCH report says. Otherwise, no one knows what the long-term effects will be of minors exposed to age-inappropriate or sexually explicit material, it concludes."
