October 18, 2004
Technology in Focus features analysis of recent technology news articles, by the consultants in Technology Group, IDA. This is the top pick of the month from a list of 10 - 20 news analysis compiled monthly.
Nokia launches new barring solution for safe controlled usage of mobile content services, Phonecontent, 22 Sep 2004
by Steven Ong, ENAT Consultant
Social Implication
Based on a study conducted by IT research film - Visiongain, an estimated 72 per cent of web users visit porn sites, this coupled with the growing pervasiveness of multimedia handsets with high resolution picture quality will see the demand for porn via mobiles skyrocket. Forecast from Visiongain predicts that profits from pornographic materials transmitted to mobile phones will reach an annual $4bn by 2006.
With advances in mobile handset technology, web surfing and even movie viewing has become something that is achievable on the mobile handset. The wall garden approach which operators have counted on to regulate the kind of content that are accessible to it subscribers can no longer be relied upon. Mobile subscribers more than ever are demanding full access to contents that are available on the Internet. Operators too recognized the potential revenue to be gain form the data access traffic, and are acceding to the subscribers' will.
By opening the floodgate, operators unfortunately will also be exposing minors to content which may be deem unsuitable for their age, primary of which would be porn sites. Furthermore, the mobility characteristic of phone makes it impossible for parents to actively monitor the child on the kind of sites visited. Parental anxieties are therefore a genuine concern and mobile operators will need to balance lucrative revenues from content businesses with its social responsibilities.
Possible Solutions
To address the problem, mobile network operators in UK have in January this year announced a joint Code of Practice designed to restrict access to adult content with the aim of protecting children from unsuitable material. According to the code, all commercial content deemed unsuitable for minors will be classified '18' and not be made available to customers unless their age is verified. Likewise, unmonitored chat rooms will only be accessible for adult users, and parents will be able to apply filters to operators' Internet access services to keep minors from accessing mature content. The Code also makes provision for barring and filtering mechanisms to be deployed by all operators' networks by December 2004.
In terms of filtering solutions, Nokia's ICD product along with others in the market such as Soprano's MobileNanny enables mobile network operators to provide opt-in access control services to their customers. In most cases, these filtering systems rely on a rating system where web contents are rated according to certain objective criteria.
Standardized Rating System
To ensure a standardised rating system that is interoperable between the various filtering solutions in the market, W3C has been developing since 1995 a technology standard known as the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). The PICS system defines labels (meta-data tags) that are used to define the materials on a web page. In conjunction with a PICS compliant filtering software, it can be used to prohibit access to the materials. The level of access is controlled by the recipient himself through his profile settings on the web browser for the types of materials that are deem safe for the intended recipient. The whole concept is based on the premise of self censorship with responsible webmasters appending the appropriate PICS label into the html header or for finer granularity control individual images and links within a web page.
Other than the webmasters themselves, independent rating databases can also be provided by service providers such as the ISP and Mobile Network operators. Taking into considerations the social and cultural differences between countries, multiple third party rating databases may and are created independently by each nation based on different value judgements.
Globally, the PICS system is supported by a number of Rating Bureaus and Self Service Rating List providers which provide a set of questionnaires that automate the process of determining and generating the appropriate PICS label for the content providers. The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is one of such Self Service Rating List providers which is working closely with GSM Association to extend the service to the mobile space. ICRA further provides ICRAplus, a free PICS compliant filtering software that users could install onto their PC to block or allow access to websites, including unlabelled sites. Work is currently ongoing within W3C to develop a new label format - XML based Resource Description Framework (RDF) similar to what is being proposed for the Semantic Web project. RDF provides a lightweight ontology system to allow more expressive description of materials so that the granularity of filtering can be enhanced. In terms of browser implementation, PICS is supported on two of the most commonly used web browsers in the market; Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Conclusion
Past experiences from the fixed internet have shown that it is impossible to completely filter off all offensive content on the net. However, the option of having such a means being made available to parents with young children does make a world of difference, especially when mobile phones are relatively affordable and accessible to the kids of today. Mobile operators can also do their part by educating parents on the usage of mobile internet and making available useful information on preventive measures or links to filtering tools which parents could consider using to safeguard their children's welfare.
Some words about the writer
Steven Ong is a consultant with the Technology Group, tasked with the responsibility of identifying, tracking and exploring leading edge enabler technologies in the mobile wireless arena. He is currently looking at areas such as Digital Rights Management, wireless security as well as smartphone application platforms.
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