The Facebook narrative in the online child protection space positions the company somewhere in the vicinity of Mother Theresa, Gandhi and a very large but cool cuddly teddy bear. Soft, virtuous and hip.

Unless Facebook starts paying attention to a few very important details I'd say it is only a...

My last blog was prompted by a story I read in the New York Times showing the amounts of money being spent by high tech companies seeking to influence the policies of US Federal institutions. I promised to look into what was going on in the UK and...

Lobbyists are like lawyers. Normally in return for coin of the realm they put forward their client's case for or against a particular proposition. Clearly they cannot be relied upon to draw attention to weaknesses in the point of view they are seeking to advance but if all sides of...

Last Saturday the Daily Mail carried a detailed account of the Prime Minister's views on how online child safety in the UK should move forward. I checked and can confirm that in all of its essentials the story was accurate. The devil will be in the detail but...

As you probably already knew, Starbucks provides free access to the internet via WiFi. This is available to anyone who is on (or very near) their premises. In the UK, BT Openzone is the WiFi provider, under contract to Starbucks.

Where I live in London is directly opposite a Starbucks....

The NSPCC sent out Freedom of Information requests to all 43 local police forces in England and Wales. Inter alia they asked how many indecent photographs of children (child abuse images), as defined by the Protection of Children Act, 1978, each of them had seized between March, 2010...

In the UK the Gambling Act, 2005, established a licensing regime for companies wanting to run gambling web sites. To obtain an online operator's licence, inter alia, companies had to show they had a robust method for verifying that all their customers are aged 18 or above.

At one level...

Something quite remarkable has happened at Google and it seems to have passed by largely unnoticed.

Google were known to be more than a little miffed they had missed the social networking bandwagon. They first joined the fray with Google Buzz. It bombed. In November, 2011, the company

Some time ago 02 announced free public WiFi system for central London. It is being rolled out in time for the Olympics. McDonald's hamburger chain has had free WiFi in every branch for some time. Another big offering is just getting, not so much off the...

All of the UK's mobile phone networks run a system of filtering to keep web-based adult content away from children who access the internet via a mobile phone handset. The policy was first introduced voluntarily back in January 2004. It is still in place as a voluntary measure....

Hoping to encourage the habit of reading large numbers parents have been buying Kindles for their children. I know of at least one very famous public school where almost every modern gizmo is frowned upon, but not the Kindle. It is applauded.

Kindles are internet enabled. They can connect either...

I made two Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to the UK's Ministry of Justice. I asked for the latest official data on offences involving indecent images of children for England and Wales. The final set of answers arrived last week.

I expect many people imagined that after all the publicity...

Child abuse images, or child pornography as it is still more commonly known in many jurisdictions, are one of the signature crimes of the internet. From the first realisation that the internet was being used in this way in many countries around the world the internet industry, children's...

The WHOIS directory is meant to be the definitive and publicly accessible list of owners of internet domain names. ICANN is responsible for its management and maintenance. Their main agents in this work are the registries and the registrars.

I...

John Naughton is a rare and exotic creature. Having just read his bio we seem to share an Irish heritage and as children we both encountered the Jesuits, but people who read the Observer, the Sunday version of the Guardian, will know him, as I do,...

About this time of year lots of technology pundits write columns about what they think is going to happen in the upcoming twelve months or so. I have decided to join in.

You don't need to be Einstein to work out that Neelie Kroes's recent announcement is going...

As I travel the globe talking about online child protection I have been delighted to be able to tell audiences about the exemplary response of the British mobile phone industry to some of the challenges of online child protection.

The Code

The story begins nearly eight years ago as the...

Neelie Kroes is a Vice President of the European Commission. She is responsible for the European Union's ambitious Digital Agenda. Robert Madelin is her CEO, being the Director-General for Information Society and Media. In an earlier blog I said this dynamic duo were the "new sherriffs...

I went to Rome last week. The occasion was an important conference organised by the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in association with Telefono Azzurro. Translated literally Telefono Azzurro means "Blue Telephone" signifying their origins as a helpline for children. Today Telefono Azzurro is...

As with many great inventions there are competing claims as to who got there first. However, for the Brits and lots of others the Scotsman John Logie Baird is widely regarded as being the first man to bring everything together to produce moving images and sound which were of high...