European industry partners agree to set of five action points to make the internet safer for children
A group of 28 industry partners, have signed a statement of purpose, agreeing to take action in five areas in helping to make the internet safer for children, including making it easier to report harmful content, ensuring privacy settings are age-appropriate, and offering wider options for parental control, reflecting the needs of a generation that is going online at an increasingly young age.
The founding Coalition members have agreed a Statement of Purpose agreeing to take action in five areas:
- Simple and robust reporting tools: easy-to-find and recognisable features on all devices to enable effective reporting and responses to content and contacts that seem harmful to kids;
- Age-appropriate privacy settings: settings which take account of the needs of different age groups (such settings determine how widely available a user’s information is; for example whether contact details or photos are available only to close contacts rather than to the general public);
- Wider use of content classification: to develop a generally valid approach to age-rating, which could be used across sectors and provide parents with understandable age categories;
- Wider availability and use of parental control: user-friendly tools actively promoted to achieve the widest possible take-up;
- Effective takedown of child abuse material: to improve cooperation with law enforcement and hotlines, to take proactive steps to remove child sexual abuse material from the internet.