Letting Children be Children
44.
Parental controls that might restrict children's access to adult content already exist on many internet—enabled devices. But whilst many provide a reasonable level of protection, they cannot be completely effective and in many instances can be bypassed relatively easily. However, industry experts we spoke to during this Review told us they believe parental controls are an effective way to prevent accidental access to harmful content and consider that the better products on the market can withstand reasonable attempts at disabling them.
45.
Following concerns that there was variation in the quality of parental controls, the BSI PAS74 Kitemark scheme was set up to identify those products that performed to the required safety standard. Despite endorsement by Professor Tanya Byron of this initiative (Byron, 2008), to date there is only one product that has achieved accreditation: we would like to see greater adoption of this scheme by industry.
46.
We see filters as a hugely important tool and we would like to see manufacturers, retailers, internet service providers (ISPs) and others adopt an approach that is much more supportive of parents. Industry already does much to help educate parents about parental controls, age—restriction and content filters. Such initiatives are extremely worthwhile, and should continue. However, it is not acceptable to expect parents to be solely responsible for what their children see online, and industry must take greater responsibility for controlling access to adult material online in the same way as they do when providing this sort of content through other channels, such as cinema, television, DVDs or adult magazines. We believe that there is no logical reason for not bringing internet—enabled devices into line with other platforms in order to protect children from inappropriate material.
47.
There has been much discussion about whether or not filters should be activated by default, with users only being able to access adult material if they take the trouble to remove the filters. We note, however, that Professor Tanya Byron concluded that this "could lull some parents into a false sense of security...[as they would] need do nothing more to help their children go online safely" (Byron, 2008). But we are also aware that Professor Byron recommended that the Government should consider a requirement for content filters on new home computers to be switched on by default if other approaches were failing to have an impact on the number and frequency of children coming across harmful or inappropriate content.
48.
We believe that it is now time for a new approach. Specifically, we would like to see industry agreeing across the board that when a new device or service is purchased or contract entered into, customers would be asked to make an active choice about whether filters should be switched off or on: they would be given the opportunity to choose to activate the solution immediately, whether it be network—level filtering by an ISP or pre—installed software on a new laptop.We believe that this will substantially increase the take—up and awareness of these tools and, consequently, reduce the amount of online adult material accessed by children.
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