Porn Problem On Mobile Phones Solved

from the phew dept

For the last few months, the idea that kids would be running around accessing all sort of awful pornography on their mobile phones has been getting increasing attention, mainly due to misleading studies and a growing frenzy of people who hear the words "porn" and "children" and like to freak out before any details are known. However, it seems that worried parents around the globe can now rest easier, since we're being told the problem of porn on mobile phones has been solved by some new filters. Yes, despite the fact that porn filters on much more powerful computers have been shown to barely work at all, while tending to block plenty of perfectly legitimate sites and images, apparently these porn filters on mobile phones work perfectly. Or, at least, that's the impression you would get reading this article that doesn't seem to doubt the fact that these mobile phone porn filters must work. At the same time, no one has yet demonstrated that the issue of porn on mobile phones actually is a problem - but the article does make clear that wireless carriers are going to need to manage all this filtering software themselves, because it won't run at the handset level. So, we now have an expensive to maintain non-working solution to a problem that might not exist.