Last year, Japan announced a plan to provide filters for mobile devices used by minors. From Japan’s Mainichi Daily News:
Only one in every three Tokyo middle school students has activated filters on their cell phones that block access to sites considered harmful to youth, a police survey has found. Data was collected from 3,049 middle school students from a total of eight public and private schools in Tokyo last July in the form of a written questionnaire. Some 74 percent of the students owned cell phones, but only 36.6 percent had activated their filtering settings.
Since April 1, cell phone companies have been obligated to provide filters on cell phones sold to youth under 18 years of age. Though parents are not punishable under the law, they are required to inform cell phone companies if a phone they are purchasing is for use by a child. Police consider parents the key to whether or not cell phone filters are used: Among the reasons given by students for not activating the filters, “Because my parents have not told me to” was highest at 42.1 percent. Likewise, the top reason for activating the filters was “Because my parents told me to” at 64.6 percent.
While compared to the use of filtering by parents in the U.S.(55%) and Europe (59 %) 33 % may seem low, but keep in mind this is something new, mobile devices, so for an initial adoption rate I’d actually consider this quite good. Filters took a long time to reach 50% adoption in U.S. homes – they were only 33% in 2002. So look for this to increase with time, as the rapidly grown mobile filtering market matures and improves.
– David Burt
Filed under: Filtering, Mobile Phones
