March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia 1 Children and ICTs Anne M Clarke things we need to know

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia2 How many? How many 4 to 12 year old children use the Web every day? Answer - nearly all of them How many 4 to 12 year old children have a mobile phone? Answer - nearly all of them over 6 or 7 years of age its a 'MUST HAVE'

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia3 How much? Average weekly spend by 7 to 15 year olds? 19 (thats 1000 per year!) there are 6.7M children in UK 35M in Europe (total spend 35B) Children will be a $43.1B market world wide by 2009 Mobile services for the youth market is currently €13.4B Source: UK National Statistics Office Source:Visiogain 2004 Source:Marcusevans 2004

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia4 Marketing Viewpoint Psychology of young children Pester power vulnerable to lifestyle marketing activities other industries are better organised they understand that this is a PROTECTED MARKET eg toy sector, gaming industry

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia5 Risks to young children from ICTs Unsupervised communications with unknown contacts leading to 'grooming' ……... Misuse and Abuse bullying through text messages happy slapping, blue-jacking "Am I hot or not?" web sites

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia6 Parents are asking why?…... "food companies have hijacked new technologies, such as the internet and text messaging, to promote unhealthy sugary and fatty foods to young children" Loopholes in technical safeguards "A child obtained access to a pay-per-view pornography site, paying by sending a 2 text message from a pre-pay phone, and being sent the access code by text" Filtering and blocking agents are weak need industry consensus, active maintenance agreement on rating of each individual content stream source: Which? 2006

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia7 ………….and when? At what age should a child have their own mobile phone? a web page? a domain name? a blog? Up to what age should parents have the right to read a child's text messages?

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia8 …...and where is my child? Will LBS make a child alone more safe, or less safe? Current LBS accuracy limited to mobile cell size Next generation LBS will improve accuracy to less than 3m will this make a child more or less safe? Next generation technologies (pervasive, ad hoc networking) how safe are these technologies for young children?

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia9 What do we need to do? Research social consequences of ICTs for young children BEFORE widespread deployment more research best practice ICT usage for young children even more research guidelines parents, service providers

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia10 The industry needs to be more child aware Should service providers be told if the user is a young child? What internal processes are in place to deal with young child customers? how does Data Protection impact the holding of, or use of, a young child's personal details? How do we do user identification, if the user is a child? Would service providers limit the scope of services used young children? LBS, automatic signup texts

March 2006HFT2006, ETSI Sophia11 towards safer, and more secure ICT for young children STFQC Guidelines for service providers on the provision of information services to young children publication: Sept 2007 The ChildAware Charter An agreed, EU wide, self regulatory code of practice for service providers who have young children as customers If you would like to help, or need more information please contact me