Porn on phone screens

You might want to think twice before giving your child a cell phone with Web access. "Half of all wireless data content" - meaning Web content made accessible to those little cell phone screens - "is of an adult nature," Reuters reports. This is Web content specially designed for viewing on mobile phones, but it doesn't require super-sophisticated phones; it's available to just about any phone with a little screen that has been sold in the past year or so - for $5-$10 on top of your typical calling plan. "Mobile phone users around the world will spend $1 billion a year on pornography sent to their handsets by 2008," according to just-released Yankee Group market research cited by Reuters, and just as with the fixed Internet on our desktops, porn is expected to fuel the mobile phone service business. Vodafone, "the world's biggest mobile operator," has added child protections to its service in the UK, where Internet safety is a priority. Obviously the technology for cell-phone parental controls exists, but the US carriers have yet to adopt it. It's "in trials" at more than one carrier, said Chris Herrell, a spokesman for Boston-based BCGI, creators of the technology. For more on phone parental controls in the US, see my feature on this last May. And for info on Childnet International's pioneering work in Europe, see this page on their site. Here, too, is evidence (at Out-Law.com) that all UK mobile operators are working toward child protection: a new self-labeling or -classification system for publishers of mobile Web content.