14 DAY TRIAL // Leading European mobile telephone operators are planning to introduce a safety code that is supposed to protect children using mobile phones.
The companies including Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have agreed to control the access to adult material and promote awareness campaigns for parents and children to fight illegal content.
As many as 15 firms signed an agreement with the European Commission, according to which they have committed to classifying commercial content according to the national decency standards and they are to try and implement the self-regulatory code by February 2008.
Which means that around this time next year, if you're an adolescent from Europe, accessing adult content will apparently not be an option.
More kids own mobile phones as each day passes by and at the moment - according to certain data - in 2005, 70 percent of European 12-13-year-olds as well as 23 percent of the 8-9 year-olds owned a cell phone. Around 92 percent of the kids in Germany, aged between 12 and 19 had a cell phone that year.
Mobile phones can of course be used to access the Internet, download games, music or videos and implicitly access adult content. For this reason, there are strong efforts to limit the cell phone use and access to various services that are considered inappropriate for younger users.
EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding said the accord "is an important step forward for child safety" and that the EU's executive body "will monitor very closely the implementation of today's agreement."
"It is not only the question of the mobile operators, it is also the question of parents, of teachers, of industry, of public authorities, so the society as a whole," she added.