Orange, O2: We're Not Pitching New Services at Kids

According to the Times, the parliamentary threat was triggered by news that Orange was pondering a U.K. launch of Zap Zone. Introduced last year in France, the service lets 11-17 year olds download pictures to phones and join online chats and competitions. But an Orange spokesman said the operator “currently has no intention of launching Zap Zone or any similar service in the U.K.”

The newspaper also said O2 is talking with Disney about introducing a Disney-branded U.K. service. A spokesman said O2 is in talks with several companies in the U.K. but nothing has been decided. “We don’t market to kids” under 16, he said.

Both operators signed a conduct code developed after a 2000 Health Protection Agency report. The report found no proof mobile phones pose a health threat, but urged discouraging use by children for nonessential purposes. The industry should “refrain from promoting the use of mobile phones by children,” the report said. The Orange spokesman said: “Notwithstanding the lack of substantiated evidence to suggest that mobile phones are unsafe, Orange endorses the recommendation.”

“Whether they are directly marketing is pure semantics,” All-Party Group chair Phil Willis was quoted as saying. “If they are selling services that are attractive to children, then that is against the spirit of the code and the Government has a duty to regulate where the industry cannot self-regulate.” The All-Party Mobile Group didn’t respond to our query by deadline, but the O2 spokesman said that firm is in regular contact with legislators on mobile phone issues. “We'll try to calm their fears,” he said.

This month, O2 CEO Peter Erskine opened an online debate on Spiked.com on “mobile phones and child protection -- how far should we go?” A March 1 forum in London will continue the discussion. Erskine said mobiles “are positive” in that they let parents stay in touch with children, but “there are risks, particularly as new devices and applications become available: risks of inappropriate contact, or exposure to inappropriate content.”

O2 has made a “sincere effort” to guard children using mobile phones by letting customers bar access to premium rate SMS chat rooms, moderating and monitoring its own chat rooms, placing automatic filters on chat rooms to prevent exchange of phone numbers and profanities, requiring age verification and developing an industrywide code on content and contact, Erskine said. The firm is writing a white paper for application and network developers to use in examining O2 technology and, particularly, IPv6 for vulnerabilities that pedophiles might exploit, he wrote.

Children like mobile phones partly because they want to copy adult behavior, wrote Kent U. sociology Prof. Frank Furedi. Mobiles are “perceived by pre-adolescents as a symbol of adolescence,” a new age “variant on traditional ‘hanging out.'” Parents view mobiles as a “digital leash” to track children’s movements. But while parents see phones as a way to extend their control, children see them as route to independence, a healthy goal.

“All we can hope for is that while they may turn off the phone when they think they don’t need us, they will turn it on again when they think they do,” Furedi said. “It’s up to us to teach them to be mature enough to know the difference.”

Children using mobiles face “3C’s” of risk: content, contact and commercialism, Childnet International said. The main area of concern is contact, said the nonprofit. “Those who want to establish direct contact with children for the purposes of sexual exploitation -- away from parents and other caregivers -- have a ready made means for doing so.” And mobile phones increasingly see use in bullying in the U.K., the group said.

Childnet noted several challenges arising from mobile technology’s “phenomenal speed” of growth. Many customers don’t register their details and are nearly impossible to identify. Phones let children communicate with anyone, away from parental supervision. Location-based services can put children at risk. Mobiles some day could see use as payment tools or to store detailed or sensitive information. The group wants a “holistic” approach to mobile phone use in which govts., operators, product developers, content providers, sellers, parents and children play parts.

With mobile firms accepting their responsibilities to children, their networks and brands risk irreparable damage from the growing likelihood that mobile phones will come to be seen less as a useful communication device and more as a surveillance vehicle, said John Carr, chmn. of the U.K.’s Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety.

To fight terrorism or to streamline public services, govts. are grabbing new legal and technological tools, said Carr: Less noticed is the “steady emergence into the mass consumer market of a whole array of cheap, easy to use surveillance technologies which will soon enable every Tom, Dick and Harriet to become their own 007.” The mobile phone industry is facilitating the process, Carr said: “Big mistake.”

Child protection is where spy products are pitched most heavily, said Carr. The “Teddyfone” converts to a listening device and has tracking capability. The i-Kids phone notifies parents if a child steps outside a set “geo-fence.” Those gadgets have no place in normal family life and will destroy trust, he said. That’s “precisely where we may be heading unless the government or the industry calls a halt.”