IWF Watch

Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced that the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will be asked for the first time to actively seek out illegal images of child abuse on the internet, working closely with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre. At a summit of major internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, mobile operators and social media companies, an agreement was reached that the IWF should, for the first time, work with CEOP to search for and block child sexual abuse images.

The UK's leading ISPs -- Virgin Media, BSkyB, BT and TalkTalk -- committed to provide a further £1 million to help fund this new proactive approach and to help tackle the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material online. Additionally, all the companies present signed up to a zero tolerance pledge on child sexual abuse imagery.

This will be the first time the IWF has been asked to take on a proactive approach to detect and act against criminal material. The IWF, working alongside CEOP, and the wider internet industry, will ensure the UK leads the way in the global battle against child sexual abuse. New funding will allow more to be done to actively search, block and remove more child sexual abuse images.

This is a fundamental change in the way that child sexual abuse content will be tackled. It is estimated that there are one million unique images of child abuse online yet only 40,000 reports are made to the IWF each year. The IWF will no longer have to wait for illegal material to be reported before they can take action, but will work with CEOP to take the fight to those behind child sexual abuse images.

It was agreed at the summit that:

• A new proactive role would be taken on by the IWF, working with CEOP -- industry funding will increase to reflect this new role with £1 million more provided by the four major ISPs over the next four years to tackle child sexual abuse material online;

• Any relevant organisation which does not yet operate splash pages will introduce them by the end of the month so that when someone tries to access a page blocked by the IWF, they will see a warning message (a splash page') stating that the page may contain indecent or illegal content;

• All present would sign up to a 'zero tolerance pledge towards child sexual abuse content on the internet;

• The industry will report to the Culture Secretary within a month on how they can work to support the new proactive approach being taken on this issue through the use of their technology and expertise.

The summit also reviewed the considerable progress that has been made to protect children from harmful or inappropriate content online, including:

• The four main ISPs are now offering an active choice on parental controls to all new customers;

• The main public Wi-Fi providers have pledged to offer family friendly Wi-Fi in public places where children are likely to be;

• The main ISPs have committed to delivering home network parental controls by the end of the year allowing restrictions to be set - simply and quickly - on all devices in the home;

• Internet providers are now regularly telling customers about parental controls through emails and their bills;

• ISPs will email account holders when any filter settings are changed to ensure the change is approved by an adult.

The Culture Secretary will convene a further meeting, once the industry has reported on what more it can do to support this proactive approach, to ensure that real action is taking place. Notes to Editors

The companies attending the summit were Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, O2, EE and Three. They were joined by CEOP and the IWF.

But the Daily Mail wasn't impressed

See  article from  dailymail.co.uk

Child porn summit that ended up a damp squib: Internet giants still refuse to install automatic filters to force users to opt in'

A ComRes poll conducted among a representative sample of 2058 British adults for the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) shows the vast majority of people in Britain think that child sexual abuse content ("child pornography") (91%) and computer generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse (85%) should be removed from the internet.

• 83% are 'concerned' about child pornography with 74% saying they are 'very concerned'.
• 77% are 'concerned' about computer generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse;
• 73% are 'concerned' about terrorist websites;
• 68% are 'concerned' about very extreme/violent pornography;
• 62% are 'concerned' about hate websites (racist or homophobic);
• 61% are 'concerned' about suicide websites;
• 51% are 'concerned' about eating disorder websites.

The survey also revealed some differences in views between men and women, with women being more concerned than men across all categories of material:

	% concerned
	Men	Women
Photographic child sexual abuse	80	86
Computer-generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse	73	80
Terrorist websites	71	75
Very extreme/violent pornography	60	76
Hate websites, eg, racist/homophobic	56	67
Websites promoting suicide	54	69
Websites encouraging eating disorders	40	61

Throughout the whole of 2012, the Internet Watch Foundation logged just 73 UK webpages hosting child sexual abuse images or videos. This compares to 9,477 hosted in other countries around the world.