Brussels, 05/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has hailed the joint efforts of technology companies to strengthen safety for children on the internet. Substantial progress has been recorded since the creation of the coalition of 28 companies on 1 December 2011 (see EUROPE 10507) but the efforts must not stop there, Kroes told coalition representatives at their meeting on 4 June. She said: “The coalition has delivered great concrete results on five items, but we cannot stop here. Children start using the internet from the age of seven, on average, and the age is getting lower each year. They need quality content online, and skills and tools for using the internet safely. Parents need support. And we are all better off if companies play a leading role in this effort.”
Given the fact that children surf the internet from an ever younger age, the companies participating in the coalition have worked on the conception of stronger reporting tools that are simpler to use, privacy settings that are more adapted to different age groups, better content classifications and a wider availability of parental control filters. In concrete terms, the 31 current members of the coalition now provide appropriate parental control tools and have updated a European database that enables parents and educators to use the existing privacy settings. The coalition has also developed measures to raise more awareness about the safety of children online, and created a technical taskforce for the interoperability of the tools and measures adopted. Thinking to the future, the company representatives spoke of their resolve to continue their joint efforts, stressing that with regard to the protection of children, it is cooperation that must prevail and not competition. They cited a number of areas in which they intend to deepen their cooperation - (i) sharing their educational material via an online platform, allowing other companies to re-use this same material free of charge; (ii) developing a common branding or logo in the European Union in order to scale up their efforts and attract more attention; (iii) encouraging the hundreds of thousands of employees in the coalition companies to work to achieve fixed objectives (by suggesting, for example, that they talk about how to be safe online in their children's schools); (iv) working together to raise awareness amongst parents; (v) using best practice beyond the coalition in order to join forces across the whole internet. (IL/transl.fl)