Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 27, 2011 - 09:00AM
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> ANJAN BOSE: Good morning, everyone. I see David coming in. Welcome, David. Just a short announcement. Yesterday, we had informed our members that the meeting will be at 9:30 instead of 9:00. And we just realized with the later schedule, that it's scheduled at 9:00 this morning. It looks like we are going to start a bit late. Hopefully, we will see more people coming in around 9:15, 9:20. So we should not go beyond that, hopefully.
Please bear with us. We are going to start in maybe another 15 to 20 minutes, and the organisers have promised us we can go beyond our scheduled 10:30 timing, so maybe close to 11:00, just to compensate the delay.
Thank you.
(Pause.)
>> ANJAN BOSE: Good morning, everyone. Welcome and a very good morning to all of you, all friends, colleagues and faces that we haven't met before.
Thank you again for coming in early, and sorry for the delay.
We apologize, because yesterday we were hoping to start today at 9:30, but somehow the schedule got changed. So thanks for your patience and bearing with us. There are a few more people we are expecting to come in, but, and one of the speakers, we had one formal presentation for the day, and she is stuck in the traffic for the last 45 minutes. I just got a text message from her.
We will try to see how we can accommodate her during the session. My idea was, we would get things started with the presentation, and then get into the thick of things with discussion between the members, as we had done earlier in the previous IGFs.
I think there will be a bit of change in the plan, but that is how we work, right? Change of Internet policies and change of different things around us, we have to adapt. And we hope we can adapt similarly here.
Anyways, for people who, I think there are a few people here which we haven't met before. I want to introduce myself. I'm Anjan Bose from ECPAT International. And we are the chair of the coalition of childhood online safety at IGF. We have equal participation from all the members here. We thank you for that. We have people from the private sector, Microsoft at the back, and welcome to you too. Thanks very much for coming in, and we have some distinct experts and panelists who will be speaking in various other workshops throughout the event.
I would like to start because, you know, this is our own session. This is not like we are presenting to an external audience. This is to identify things over the Dynamic Coalition members, if you permit me to give a little bit of history how we started, and what is the difference between this session and all the other workshops related to child protection that is being convened at the IGF.
One distinct element of these Forum is definitely the members themselves, because if you can remember some of us who were there in 2007, we know the IGF started in 2006. I think John was the only one who was present there in Athens. But since 2007, because of these Dynamic Coalition, we have seen large number of participation from child rights agencies and relevant stakeholders including law enforcement, including IT companies, private sector, telecommunication companies, civil society, and we have kept the momentum going until now.
That is a big thing for us, I think, that we have assembled together. We have kept our focus there. We have continued to engage in decision-making and lobbying the policymakers throughout the last five years, and that is I think a big achievement for the whole group.
I would expect that this session is not really presenting what we are doing individually, because that we know very well what each individual members are doing through the individual communications we have. It is not an area to kind of highlight our individual work.
I would strongly encourage you that when you introduce yourselves, please just say who you are, which organisation you represent, and then what will, the agenda for the day is something like this.
We will, as I said before, we are planning to have the presentation from Natasha Jackson from GSMA, on research that they did with young people's use of mobile phone; and because she is not here yet, we probably have to kind of push things and rearrange things.
What we will do is, we will open up the floor, and we will give the space for all the members here to identify one or two key things, patterns, trends that you have observed, you have identified over the course of last one year. And that could be in the realm of policy-making and the realm of working directly with children, key initiatives that you think has worked well, rather than, as I said before, not repeating what your organisation does in general.
So we have a kind of global representation here from different regions. It would be great to hear from individual members from different regions, what are the things that they have been observing lately, any new developments on the IT front, in telecommunication in terms of online applications, in terms of how young people are reacting to these changes, and so on.
So I will let you bring up those issues. And the other good thing about this Forum is we have ample expertise from all of you here. So if somebody can identify a key issue, there will be hopefully some response, some suggestions, some guidelines from other experts who are present here, to talk a little bit more about it.
I know there is a representation from the youth, so you are very welcome here, and you are the one who will bring new thoughts, new direction to our work, and we hope to have a good combined recommendation at the end of the session that can be put forward as a report of the Dynamic Coalition to the IGF Secretariat.
Again I'll close here, saying thank you again, and we need to keep the momentum going for the next few foreseeable years, or until wherever we can keep engaged with the IGF process, and think of this as your chance to showcase or to raise issues and to identify issues which probably will not get mentioned anywhere in the other workshops during the event.
With that, and if you have any questions, the other thing I forgot to mention is maybe towards the end, if any of the members want to make an announcement of the word that you want to let others know, you are welcome to do that. But keep that for the last part of the event, of the session.
I would welcome anybody who, if anybody has a comment or suggestion, or should we just go around the table, if somebody has a pressing question or a comment, please raise your hand.
I don't see a hand. That's why I would rather make a decision here. We will just allow, we will go from the left to the right. We will move around the desk, and let individual members speak a little bit of what they have been seeing over the course of the last one year. Stick to maybe two, three minutes maximum, given that we have an hour and a half. And something that's really pressing, something that has come up lately, something that you really want others to know, and if you also think that there is a sexy story, please share with us.
So, Adrian, if you can start, thank you.
>> Thank you very much. My name is Adrian Dwyer, Executive Director of INHOPE Association. I think for us, one of the notable things that happened in the last year is the setting up of the INHOPE Foundation, which is a charitable trust which we have set up to support and help develop hot lines in emerging countries, new and emerging countries.
So they can actually establish national hot lines, and work within the INHOPE network. So for ourselves, that is certainly one of the major milestones of the last year, is INHOPE is now in a position where we can help hot lines in these new and emerging countries.
>> Hi. My name is Dave Miles from the Family Online Safety Institute, based in the United States and in Europe as well. I think over the last year there has been a number of trends, depending on the geographical region that you are in. Certainly from a European perspective, there is a lot of activity from the commission, the digital agenda, which I think is very important. You are seeing the review of copper as well in the United States, which is interesting, so there are a number of trends.
As an international organisation we are influenced by other things as well. We have been commissioned by the World Bank for a project in Asia in terms of family online safety in the region there. One of the things we are seeing, an overall thing is digital shift from west to east in the terms of numbers of users and growth Internet particularly in Asia.
We are finding that quite interesting, and I think it's an important precursor to the major development next year, which is the emergence of more top line domains, and we think the creation of a lot more local content on the ground, which will feed into family online safety, and to the capacity of youth to generate their own content.
>> Hello, good morning. I'm from ITU International Telecommunication Union, which is a leading UN agency on ICTS. I'm working on the child online protection initiative which is launched by IT Secretary-General in 2008, under the framework is activities in global cyber-security agenda.
For the last one years, for the last past one years, we are more focusing on technical aspect of child online protections. So currently, ITU technical expert group is working on the issue of technical aspect of child online protection.
This group is studying which kind of area, which area they can work on, maybe it could be digital identification, it could be anything about the technical procedures to protect childrens. Actually, I want to ask, discuss with you of you, who are the most expert in this area, to any kind of proposals, what you think about technical aspect of child online protections, and then I will be more than happy to discuss with all of you in this area.
Another one we are focusing on is ITU is now working more focusing on the national benefit, although some of general trends of childhood online protection is quite similar, all different continents, but we see that individual country or different continent have their own aspect, what kind of things, what kind of issue they think is the best or more serious in this area.
I'll be happy to discuss with all of you in this area, and then I'll be more than happy to listen what your proposal, what kind of things do you want to propose to ITU. Thank you.
>> John Carr from the European NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online.
There are so many things going on at the moment, all of which are important in their own way. I guess if I had to pick one single thing, which was of, as it were, overarching or greater importance, it would be the discussions taking place in Europe about the new ICT principles. I think the name has recently been announced.
This in essence, the proposition is this: The whole set of companies from across the whole of the Internet industry, to companies that have very very diverse interests, and are not normally in the same room, let alone speaking to each other in any way, have come together to try to agree a very high level code of practice, which will set out the principles on which they will deliver a whole range of the base services to children and young people across each of the 27 Member States within Europe.
And the industry are very clear that they wanted to do this because they didn't fancy having to have 27 different conversations with 27 different governments, all around essentially the same sorts of issues.
And the view that I took as a British representative, but which we all took in our own way was that made sense because it's the same personnel in the companies that have to do these negotiations and it is around similar issues. And so we thought, yeah, okay, let's see if we can't agree this high level document, the EU wide level, but we said, as I say, as a British representative, what we said was, of course, we must reserve our right to see what comes out at the other end, because if it's so general or contradicts or whatever what we think is in the best interests of children and young people in Britain, then we will say so.
By the way, I don't think that is going to happen, but it was just the point of principle that I think everybody made. And it's logical. Incidentally, the British Government, who are not famously pro EU, they also accepted that position too. They said, okay, if there is going to be a EU-wide attempt to agree a document of this kind, that is good. Let's see what comes out the other end.
Now, what's happening at the moment is, as it were, officially a mystery to me, because it's the industry themselves that are trying to agree a sort of form of words to publish. They already published a draft, and there have been some comments back on it. And then there is a meeting next week, next Tuesday in Brussels where there will be a further discussion on the draft in the light of the comments that have been received, and there will be more discussions presumably at that meeting. Unfortunately, I won't be at it, because I've got a prior engagement. I can't make it.
But I will be at the following meeting which will be the 24th of October, where I imagine we will discover what the final outcome of all these negotiations are. This is incredibly important because it's a major effort by a large number of huge Internet companies and small Internet companies. Any company that everybody in this room can name is in there some way or another. We are all waiting to see what the outcome of the process is.
Bear in mind this all started in March of this year, when Robert Midland, the Director General of Info Soc, or whatever it's called, anyway, our commissioner, our bit of the EU, said that if self-regulation is to mean anything, it has to be seen to work, and the industry must be in the lead, because that is why they call it self-regulation, not co-regulation, and not legislation.
So, this is the process, really coming now towards its conclusion. And we are all waiting to see what the outcome is going to be.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you very much, John. I have a question; not really a question, maybe a comment here. I was going to ask you about the legislative aspect, because I guess this ICT principles is only, who are the stakeholders, are they only ICT private sector companies? Can you just elaborate what the, who the other players that are influencing this draft document?
>> JOHN: The point I was trying to make that Robert Maidland made, was self-regulation means that the industry takes the lead in regulating itself, so that is why at the moment all of the attention is on them. But of course, they have consulted with us. They have sent out documents to all of the NGOs, and I assume international governments have seen the documents. It's a public document, so it's out to everybody to consult. There have been several meetings already with children's NGOs from all over Europe in Brussels. There is two more scheduled, like I said, one on Tuesday of next week, and then one on the 24th of October.
So all of the, from the children's rights point of view, the children's organisations point of view, we are in there. We are party to it. But fundamentally, the lead is with the industry. As I said, are you going to speak about this later, Natasha?
>> NATASHA JACKSON: I wasn't going to speak on that specifically, but I'll take any questions.
>> JOHN: Google, Yahoo!, Qualcom, Microsoft, Facebook, every, Sampson, Hewlett-Packard, you name the company, that's big on the Internet, in the west at any rate, and in North America, and in Europe, and they are in there. There is about 35, 40.
>> NATASHA JACKSON: Our mailing list on the industry side is over 40 separate companies, I think 85 people are on that list. It is a very wide coalition in that sense. Some of them have never been in the room before talking on these issues before. Others like the mobile industry that I represent have been there for quite a while. There is a whole load of challenges, not least what is written in the principles but how we manage ourselves and engage.
>> JOHN: To be clear, first of all, following our representations to them, to the industry, we said, we pointed out, for example, asking NGOs to come to Brussels to take part in consultations meetings costs money, and not all NGOs have money to be able to jump on an airplane, maybe have to spend one night or two nights in a hotel in Brussels, which are very expensive anyway, so if you want this consultation to mean anything, you have to provide the funds to enable the NGOs to participate. They accepted that point. And there is a fund that will pay for NGOs to go.
The second point on that is they have also now employed somebody full time. You can imagine all these big companies trying to, it is like herding cats. They have employed a consultant based in Brussels to take forward the project. Both those things are evidence of serious good intent, evidence of serious good faith.
We are optimistic about the outcome, but we haven't yet got there. And it depends. You know, I think it's impossible that every one of the companies that are on that mailing list will sign up to the end product. For example, there is one company in there that makes microchips that get inserted in mobile telephones, and other forms of computing devices.
I'm not entirely sure with what kind of stakeholder they are, but they are in there, and there are other companies in there, that are more or less tangential to some of these issues. There are some dynamics in there which I think it's going to be difficult for the industry to resolve, but that is their problem, not mine.
We are wishing them well and waiting to see what the outcome is going to be.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks very much for clarifying, John. If any of you have questions related to any of the short speeches and comments that the individuals are making, please feel free to raise your hand.
Maybe Natasha will explain later, I'm just beginning to wonder, this is a use centric approach, and these are MNCs, right? These companies are global. How would their policies be kind of enhanced or changed or influenced by what happens in Europe? Because there are, these are the real issues that affects globally. I would be looking forward to hear more response from other parts of the world as well.
If we can move on...
>> Hi, Ann and I are with connectsafely.org, an NGO based in the United States that works with many of the major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, and also AT&T and other companies, providing mostly education to parents and to some extent young people. We also work a lot with schools and have, our materials are used globally.
We have observed during the last year, and Ann can probably speak to this as well and will speak to it in her workshops, a growing shift towards consciousness about digital citizenship and media literacy as a key part of what we sometimes talk about in terms of child protection.
But we also have noticed at least in the United States and growing consciousness certainly in other countries that even the concept of child protection goes beyond the notion that children are these vessels who need to be protected by adults, but rather children are people who need to be empowered or given agency to protect themselves, because at the end of the day, a Government or a police officer or even a parent can't protect our children 24 hours a day.
We can't be with them 24 hours a day. And even if we could, eventually they are going to turn 18 or reach the age of majority. And we certainly will have no influence or control over them. It is important that we focus on giving them the skills and the power that they need not just to protect themselves, but to thrive and to embrace this technology, to own this technology, because after all, long after we are no longer here, they are going to be the not only stewards of the earth, but also the ones who are going to be bringing in the next generation of technology.
So we are very committed to empowering young people, and trying to convince Governments around the world and adults in general not to patronize the youth, but partner with the youth and really work with them to create a better world and certainly a better Internet.
>> There is very little I can add to that. But it is really interesting to see the uptake of digital citizenship concepts around the world. We are seeing no true consensus on what it is. I think we are all together in a multinational, multicultural way, figuring it out as we go along. But I think we are seeing more and more youth agency. I'm seeing a shift from a control model to an agency model, which I think is important in a user-driven, very grass-roots social medium which the Internet is becoming, both fixed and mobile, and in many countries, mostly mobile.
So it's carried around in our pockets 24/7, sometimes left on during the night, which is not always the best thing. We are, in 2010, Larry and I both served on the first online safety Working Group, or it was created by an American law, and was the first one under the Obama administration. I have the honour of cochairing it. One of the things we called for in large group of recommendations to the American congress was that digital citizenship be made a national priority in schools. It is now being taught in about 12,000 of America's, some 99 to 100,000 public schools.
So we are seeing some empirical evidence of growing interest in digital citizenship education.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks, Ann. Just to highlight what you and Larry have said, I think there is a growing concern, I mean recognition of these, the need for digital citizenship, and that the need for empowerment, and this is of course coming from the U.S., where things are a bit different from other regions.
We have African representation here. Let's reflect on, we are doing this session in Nairobi. And we have our African colleagues here too. Do you also see a typical shift in that direction? I'm also opening up to other regions, if you can either observe similar patterns, or still a bit of confrontation going in that direction, if anybody would like to -- yes, Janice.
>> We do see the shift, but I would like to underline that it's not really digital citizenship. We see a shift towards citizenship and literacy, which really fits the information and knowledge society, and it's much much broader. It is based on a social literacy, a cultural literacy, really being part of the global world.
So I do shudder a little when I hear digital, because we are really talking about a much broader form of citizenship.
Secondly, there is something that I would like to underline. Our users are getting much younger and also much older. This is really changing the scene very much.
When they are much younger, it means that parents can have more influence on what they are doing, and we can develop good habits at an early age, so it gives us a much bigger window for educating young people, rather than protecting. This is all about education. This would be the other shift that I see, where moving from the safer Internet closed environment into education, and coming from underground I would almost say, into education in every single aspect of it, from mathematics to geography and history.
So there are a number of trends going on alongside the mobile trend, which changes very much what young people are doing online and the risks that they may encounter. Lastly, I'd like to say that we as the Insafe network which represents 30 countries across Europe are looking much more closely now at a model of developing resilience which begins from the very moment that a child takes up any sort of ICT in their hands.
>> Good morning. Jim Prendergast with the Galway Strategy Group based outside Washington, D.C.
I want to throw out something for maybe discussion, but picking up on a point that Dave mentioned earlier, and Sebastien Bachollet, board member of ICANN is in the room as well, the launch of UTLDs this year. This is beyond dot-com; dot hotel, dot food, Latin, Arabic, Chinese. You are going to start to see scripts rather than Latin that are going to open up a ton of content for people that is going to encourage them to get on line. So that may disrupt the teaching of young people and old people and broaden the need for programmes across all ages.
>> ANJAN BOSE: That is an interesting comment.
>> I want to come in to support very strongly the point that Janice made. As I said earlier, there were lots of things that have been going on. I could have picked any number. I pick the one that I did. But if I had a second choice, about some of the big stuff that we have been learning about in the past 12 months, I would say it's very much along the lines that Janice just mentioned.
By the way, I have written a blog about this. So if anybody wants to sign up to my blog who hasn't already, you will be able to see it.
But this is, a group of very rich firm of lawyers in the City of London decided as a pro bono act, as a pro bono gift as it were to, they do a lot of privacy law, so they did a major study, in fact, the biggest single study ever done of English, only English, not British, English children at school from the ages of 6, 7, something like that, up to 16 about attitudes to privacy. One of the things that came out of it was this whole thing about the use of icons and symbols and so on, as a way of getting messages over, without having to always use language, which inevitably will be complex.
But in the course of this research, they interviewed lots of school teachers from secondary schools. In England that means when they make the transition from junior to high school, age 11, all the teachers said exactly the same thing. By the time the children reach us at age 11, many of their bad habits on the Internet and many of their good habits have already been formed.
They were not saying, they were not saying, therefore, we can forget about older kids, tweens or whatever you want to call them. Emphatically they were saying that there needs to be a much tighter focus on getting kids, at least at 5-year-old, some were saying even in kindergarten, kids in, some of the kindergarten you are seeing computer devices being used by 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds. So very much a focus on, as Janice was saying, much younger children, where there is scope for influencing them, and helping them in a way that there just isn't as we know from older kids.
Now, okay, a lot of people have said we have known this for a long time, and that is true; intuitively we have known it for a long time. I'm simply pointing out that there was a very big piece of solid research done by the University of Plymouth paid for by this firm of city solicitors that absolutely backed that 100 percent.
>> ANJAN BOSE: That is of course very interesting news. Hopefully, that will be picked up by others as well, because these studies are so useful for our work. It guides, guides us, provides evidence of the actions, interventions that we take, and we are almost guided by some of the research studies.
Larry, yes, I'll come back to you. But is there any hand on this side?
>> Good morning. I'm Jacqueline from Microsoft based in Redmond, Washington, in the U.S.
I would agree with what has been said so far. Everything stems from awareness and education. I think at Microsoft this year we are building on that and evolving our nomenclature about how we talk about these issues.
Again, it is all rooted in awareness and online safety education, but we are evolving to the digital citizenship moniker and putting everything under the digital citizenship umbrella which has digital etiquette and ethics all under the new evolved umbrella where everything is shifting.
Particularly at Microsoft under the digital citizenship banner, we have two focus areas this year. We are honing in on child online protection, and we are honing in on user interaction and content, generation of content. On the child online protection space, we have some focused efforts on preventing cyber bullying, and in the user interaction and content space, we have some honed efforts on protecting online reputations.
We recently just released some research in the U.S. of teens and their parents, and what they feel their status is when it comes to online reputation and protecting those online reputations. .
>> ANJAN BOSE: Let me make a comment before Larry. This is related to digital citizenship.
The way it appears to me is that we are seeing an emerging form that needs to be defined, needs to be standardized, needs to be agreed upon. The notion of digital citizenship that appears in the west, and in the east, whether we have a consensus on what we are talking about; are we all on the same page? Or is there any model that needs to be followed, or studies that can reinforce some of the findings related to this.
I just raise this issue, because we have experts from around the world, and I definitely see this term coming up not every now and then. Of course, before going to Larry, I want to highlight one more thing which is again coming from the organisation that I represent. We definitely believe in the role of the multi stakeholders, other responsible duty bearers. It is not only on education that children is to know how to protect themselves, but what are the environment, what are the infrastructure, the mechanisms that is built around that. Are we, by just honing on this educational aspects, are we diluting some of these things that almost gets out of attention, out of focus.
So just wanted to raise few issues for your comments and discussion during this Forum. Thank you.
>> Thank you. I'm going to yield to Ann in one second. But I wanted to comment on Janice's point.
We absolutely agree with you that you can take the word digital out of digital citizenship. In fact, we have argued you can take the word cyber out of cyber bullying, that what we are talking about is citizenship and we are talking about youth behavior, and youth don't make a distinction between the so-called real world and the so-called online world. And we shouldn't either.
It is ironic that many of the NGOs in this room, I can certainly speaking for ourselves, began as Internet safety organisations, and in many ways I don't think we are about either the Internet or safety anymore. Obviously we are about the Internet and we are about safety, but we are about so much more because you can't do this in a vacuum.
You have to do it as part of the Gestalt or whole child, whole family, whole community, whole village if I may use the term, and you have to do it in context of how the child is living their life, because we will be at a point very soon if we are not already there, where the Internet is literally like the air you breathe, and like the air you breathe, it has to be clean and healthy.
>> Also, to Janice's important point, I think digital citizenship is really a transitional term, because there are so many different notions of citizenship itself around the world, notion in the western world can't be imposed on other countries or the northern hemisphere, on the southern hemisphere.
So it's almost as if digital citizenship is kind of a safe space to be talking about a new concept of citizenship that like the Internet really defies all borders. So while we are really at the early stages too globally of working out the social norms of social media, of applying the social norms that have been developed for thousands of years by humanity, to a new space where humanity functions and creates and entertains and researches and all of the things that humanity does, this is sort of a transitional term that we may need to use.
I just wanted to point out, I don't know if Australia is represented here, but there are two fine researchers at a new research institute there, Amanda Third and Pippa Colin, who are about to publish an important paper on digital citizenship called Rethinking Citizenship Through Dialogues on Digital Practice. They actually have a living lab, they call it, where young people and adults discuss social media and life and experiences in social media. And one of the points they make is that the idea of digital citizenship needs to be taken all together out of the context of youth online safety.
It needs to be discussed independently of youth risk on line. I think that is an interesting idea for all of us to entertain.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks very much, Ann. I would pass the floor to Will Gardner.
>> Hi, thanks. Will Gardner from Childnet International.
Just to reflect on some of the comments, we are bringing, we brought eight young people, over and we had discussions with them about the term from the UK -- sorry, about the term digital citizenship. There is a split in what they are saying in relation to this, whether the digital needs to be included because it's just part of life, it's an extension of, it's immersed, enmeshed in everything that we do, does there need to be a distinction. But there is a group that says our behavior is different in this environment, and there are at different impacts in the way we behave in this environment, whereby the term is still a useful one.
Certainly in the work that we do in schools, it is useful to try and encourage schools to tackle the online and the digital issues. So the term is very useful in that reference, to latch on this aspect of citizenship, particularly in the work that we do.
I think that it is a term which still does have some value.
>> My name is Yota Carl from the Digital Opportunities Foundation from Germany. And I would like to refer to what was said previously, because our strategies for the protection of children and youth are built on three pillars, which is technical tools as well as education, but also the empowerment to self-management of risks, and to do so it is quite important to understand children's and young people's perception of risks themselves.
So if we want to have a successful strategy, we need to know what children think is risky behavior on the Internet, and then we can take that up and develop a strategy. And I also think we need to take into account that not all children of each age group are the same. We need different strategies for the younger children, where we need more parental involvement, and we need separate strategies for the older children, where self-management of risks can have a higher priority.
If I go back to the time when we started this Dynamic Coalition, I think it was in Rio in 2006, we had a completely different situation, because social media were just upcoming. It did not play such a big role. And also, on the other hand, the infrastructure, when children are now going online mostly on the mobile phone, they are in a completely different situation of usage, because five years ago, mostly, they were using the Internet in an area where maybe some adults were around them, so they can ask a question, they ask for help and support.
But now when going on line with mobile phones, and as I learned yesterday here especially in Kenya, most children are using Internet via the mobile phone, though it's completely different situation when they use it, and we have to take account of that when setting up strategies. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks very much. I completely agree with your statements. I will probably, if I have chance, share with you some of the research that ECPAT is doing in some of the countries, and some of the findings are revealing, in the way we have done five country research in Africa recently. And there is one report that we have from Kazakhstan, and imagine, most people use mobile phones for Internet. It's apparently cheap. And all the other related findings. I definitely agree the strategy needs to be targeted, based with different ages and know and actively engage them what is their perception of risk, and it came out very strongly through their studies that we did.
Just to highlight what Will said, we published a report back in 2005, it was called Violence Against Children in Cyberspace. It was a contribution to the UN study.
Even then, we realized that children were saying that their behavior was very different in the online space. So things that they would do online at that time, I'm talking about six years ago, seven years ago, I think that still holds good, even though there is this immersion that as Larry said, that the difference between the distinction between off line and online is almost getting less fuzzy.
So I think some facts still is important and even now, the behavior that they do online is still different from off line behavior. And maybe through the work that we are doing, the guidelines that we are developing, we should be cognizant of that.
Is there any comment? Yes, please.
>> Hi, my name is Clara, I'm representing UNICEF. And I want to support what you said on understanding what are the source perceptions and risks that children face on the Internet, and I wanted to mention that UNICEF is also doing a couple studies on that, exploratory studies on what is children's and young people's use of Internet. We have done studies in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and South Africa.
We also are going to come out with research that our research centre has done the last couple years looking at young people's use of ICTs and also presenting a couple of points for a framework for child online protection.
I also want to add that we work, while we have, I particularly work more on child online protection, we have another area within section within UNICEF that works more on the citizenship aspects. We definitely think it's important to work on both.
Then also to look at the positive use of ICTs also in relation to how we can use that for reporting on violence and sexual exploitation. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks, Clara. I have, unless there is something on this notion, this content, I want to throw a question to the private sector who is present here, because Clara mentioned researchers. And we know there is studies going on around the world. How do we find a channel or venue through which these findings can make its way through to the policymakers and also to the companies who are designing solutions, who are designing the applications?
I'm not going to name individual companies here. Let's say all the social networks who are present here, I'll come to you, but I'll throw this question to our friends back there at Microsoft. What is your, how open are you to this research findings? Do you actively look for recommendations that you can incorporate in your work, in your services that you deliver? And what would be your probably comment or advice on this research processes? What would be the linkages that we can establish?
>> Research obviously is very important, and all of our work is data driven and driven by research. We conduct much of this research and much of these studies ourselves. And we are very interested and attuned to what others in the industry are doing and throughout the sector. But what I would caution is that research is very costly. It's very time-consuming. It is very important. But I think we need to caution that we can't have repetitive research.
We need new research that is going to lead to new findings and new developments and hopefully new innovations. But I see a trend where we are having a lot of repetitive research done, and if we would pool our efforts and mule our resources, we could have a greater impact and have more significant results that would get more attention. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: I think that is a good point. All of us in this room I think agree that there is no need for repetitive research, unless there is a very good reason for that. Any other comments? Yes.
>> I'd like to make a comment on what Microsoft said and what UNICEF said. I think it is very important inform what we think is most important to protect children of the Government. They are the policymakers. They might know about the law and policy. But they might not fully aware of what is going on among the children and the use of children's Internet. ITU is developing the child online protection strategy guide. We include some critical points that we recommend the Government, each of Government to set up sort of like a national Steering Committee; those have done the U.S. right now, Working Group on child online protection.
So proposed to each Government work with multistakeholder partnership, like committee share the information so they can inflect those comments to when they build up national strategy on child online protection.
Since 19 -- since 2009, ITU has done research, national survey on child online protection. Among 193 Member States, about 95 Member States has replied to the national survey. Each national Government has made a point that what kind of things they think is the most important issue in the country, and which agency they are working on to focus the agency on child online protection, how people can reach the information on their national centre.
So I can share those, the national survey results with all of you. If you visit our Web site, you can see the national survey results immediately.
But most important thing I want to highlight is, of course, it's important to share, listen the children's opinions, get to know how they actually use the Internet. But we can share this information to the policymakers, and then they can reflect those one to when they build those. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Yes, John.
>> Obviously, I agree with the fundamental part of what the speaker said about repetitive research. Repeating research for its own sake is of no value. But very often when you look at these things more closely, what you find is that you get whole range of different answers from what appears to be essentially the same sort of study. I'm thinking in particular here in relation to child abuse images, child pornography. There was a study published in Switzerland, for example, by a group of academics, last year, early part of last year, which purported to show that there was a zero percentage link or probability of people who had been arrested for the abuse of child abuse images, child pornography, re-offending within I think they took a three-year, five-year time frame.
No other study has shown that result. On the contrary, the biggest ever study that was ever done by people arrested by the United States Postal Inspection Service showed that roughly one in three people arrested simply for possession of child abuse images, child pornography, were in fact engaged in hands-on abuse of children, either at the time that they were arrested simply for possession, or at some time previously.
There was a study in Canada that showed another percentage. There was another study in the UK that brought another one. So the problem is that the methodologies that are being used in these studies are often actually, even though they seem to be addressing the same question, in fact, the reason they come out with very different answers is that the methodologies are very different.
For example, the biggest study, the one I mentioned from the States, the methodology was a bit shaky, and flaky. It has to be said. But, then the one from the Swiss was also a bit dodgy. But I just make the point.
I don't know if you saw the news story the other day about the group of Italian scientists who seem to have proved that particles can travel faster than the speed of light. They did the experiment 15,000 times, and actually got a consistent result over 15,000 episodes. They now need other researchers to replicate it because they don't believe that it can be true, that anything can move faster than the speed of light.
So there is, I want to make that point.
Can I move on to another aspect of this? In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges that we have got is as follows: Much of the discussion that we all take part in about policy in relation to the Internet, and here the fact that it's the Internet, the fact that it's taking place on physical devices is important, much of that discussion is based on the assumption that everybody who is using the device is averagely intelligent, averagely well educated, averagely literate, and averagely enumerate with at least averagely good eyesight, and averagely, in some cases, averagely good hearing. Right?
That may have been true in the early days of the Internet, in the early days of the technology when there was comparatively small groups of people, early adopters or whatever you want to call them, that were using the technology. It absolutely is not the case anymore.
What is it, we now have 2 billion Internet users, 2 billion people in the world using the Internet. In other words, the population of the Internet, of Internet users is now more accurately reflects humanity, and we know that in humanity there are people who are deaf, people who are blind, people who can't read, people who are very young and understand things, and so the challenge is how do we deal with this nuance and differentiated world which is the real world? And I don't think a one size fits all solution is the obvious answer.
When we speak about awareness and education and all of that, it's predicated almost always on the assumption that we are dealing with the averagely intelligent, averagely literate, averagely enumerate with good eyesight, so on and so forth, and we know that is not true. The challenge is how do we deal with that? What are the responsibilities of the industry, Government and all of the different players to deal with that?
I am afraid more funky videos on YouTube and more funky Web pages probably will not be the total answer here.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Yes, before I go to Janice, any other hands on this comment, on this last statement by John?
I have a comment before I come to Janice. I want to, this completely is in agreement with what you said, just to illustrate how the educational system doesn't always necessarily work and the assumption that we are targeting knowledgeable people, semi knowledgeable people are not true.
The instance that a family can actually abuse a child without any consent of the child through ICTs, this has happened a number of times. It's still happening.
The case I'm going to share with you is a family who had three children, 9, 11 and 13 years old. They were put up on Web cam and they were, and I have shared this information with many of you in the past, but I just couldn't resist sharing again, because what it illustrates is, and the story was that this family was making money through sharing their children's half-naked images to people who are willing to pay through off-line channels.
The educational system here doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't reach those children. It doesn't reach the parents. And we just need to make sure that whatever we are engaged in, whatever we are trying to develop, reaches everybody, all the stakeholders around the world.
I will come to you. I'll pass to Janice, please.
>> Thank you. I do apologize, I forgot to introduce myself last time. Janice Richardson, coordinator of Insafe network, and senior advisor at European School Net, which represents 30 education ministries across the world.
I'd like to go back to the point about the research, repetitive research, etcetera, and show you a good practice example that we have in Europe. In Europe we have a programme or project called EU kids online, where we actually collect all of this diverse research and try to make sense of it.
Now, to consolidate the findings so far, last year, there was a survey conducted face-to-face in 25 countries with 25,000 children, but now EU kids online is going back to collecting all of these individual researchers that are conducted. And I think that perhaps rather than trying to pool our efforts, and have common research across the countries, we could probably learn a lot more if we pooled our efforts and tried to make sure at the global level that there was some sort of database with all of this research, so that we could get these very nuanced differences that John is talking about.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you, Janice. While I was just informed by Natasha that her presentation also has something that deals with this, so because we have rearranged the session, we will have her presentation at the end of our discussion, and hopefully she can pick some of these issues in her slides.
Larry, then David.
>> Thank you. I want to comment on something you said a moment ago about how we have to address different constituencies or broad constituency.
One of the things Ann mentioned, we worked on the Obama administration's online technology Working Group, and one of the things we talked about in our report is adopting a public health model to child safety and the Internet in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary messaging, primary being something we say to virtually everyone, general education, secondary we say to people who are higher risk, and tertiary when we are dealing with a problem that needs to be addressed such as a child already being exploited.
One of the frustrations I've had being in the field for close to 20 years, the very people who show up for example at a parent Internet safety night are probably the people who least need the messaging that we have to say.
And the very people who need it the most are the ones who would never come to an Internet safety night, and in fact, as you pointed out, maybe not only parents of victims but perpetrators of crimes against children.
And also along with this, much of the information and education that has been made available certainly in the United States and globally is focused not on the general risks that we talked about earlier, when we were discussing digital citizenship, bullying, sexting, many of the things children do every day, rightfully or wrongfully, as part of their lives, but the horrible crimes that few think happen to few children relative to the total population suffer, such as being sexually abused by predators they meet online.
But we had in the United States almost a panic a few years ago over these rare but horrendous cases of child exploitation, and almost ignoring the broader issues of how children are affecting their own reputations and their own selves. One of the things we called for and are working hard to achieve, at least in the United States, is a much more granular approach recognizing that one size does not fit all, and that we need to really think about who the audience is. But I absolutely agree with you. It is very difficult to reach a certain population, and sadly, that may be the population that needs the messages the most.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Yes, please, identify yourself.
>> My name is Irene Yamo from Kenya. We run a children's help line here. We are new to this Forum, and obviously, I think very few NGOs from the children's sector here in Kenya that is engaged in this debate.
I just wanted to contribute to the debate about reaching different populations and targeting them with the messages. We have faced a number of challenges here.
First of all, the mobile, use of mobile, mobile for Internet access has really really taken up. And what we are seeing is that there seems to be a bit of a conflict between the older generation and the younger generation in terms of, first of all, the utilization, the understanding of the usefulness and the risks therein.
So that differentiation also makes it difficult to have a dialogue that is meaningful in the sense that, on one hand, the parents think there is a big risk. The children think, well, it's a great idea. But trying to create the Forum where the discussion can actively take place, this is the challenge that we are having to deal with. And therefore, different approaches will definitely be required to target the right messages. Actually, also a case of the right messaging, that will open up further discussions.
But we are definitely happy to be part of this. And we are interested in working with some of the organisations that have made a lot of inroads, particularly in the area of research and of course signalling abuse that is happening on the cyberspace and then being able to deal with it. So far we can only cite one research here in Kenya that was done within a very small population, specific to children in online safety, and what was very shocking about it was that many of the children who were using the Internet, they actually did not have an awareness of the risks that were involved.
So this is scary because now they can carry the mobile in their bags and use it without much supervision.
>> ANJAN BOSE: As I said before, our research also covering Kenya kind of verifies that statement.
We are also getting shocking results, and the fact that still a lot of awareness is missing, and because people here, goes to cyber cafes, and the cyber cafes are not only not aware, they are, some of them are refusing to do anything. And maybe that is for a different Forum. But I wanted to repeat what you said. Jeoung Hee, and David. Before we go any further, I want to make sure that, I think the next session in this room is at 11.
We probably have to leave maybe five minutes before, or ten minutes. I have a presentation from Natasha, which will follow this conversation. So unless there is something really pressing, which I would definitely welcome, you -- sorry -- please be a bit brief. And I would really encourage you to raise any issues that we can take to the plenary; if you can identify something that can be presented on behalf of the entire coalition, we have a chance to do that now.
Please note down your comments and share with us, so that we can pass it out at the plenary for sharing with the greater audience. I give the floor to David, please.
>> Thanks, Anjan. One of the projects that First is working on which has been interesting is a project called the Global Resource and Information Directory, or GRID. That is probably one of the first attempts to attract, to research the 194 countries around the world in terms of legislation and research.
It talks to in some ways the fact that there isn't actually a global approach to the emergence of technology around the world. What it also shows us as well is that what you see is that the developing world, which properly represents two-thirds of the 194 countries, are at very different stages in terms of the development.
They don't have the socioeconomic robustness or quality of institutions very often in law enforcement and in education to fulfill on some of the things that developing countries are capable of.
That is a real challenge. What we are seeing though within GRID which I think is interesting is that we would argue that in the next four to five years, most of the key aspects of technology development are largely in place in terms of mass markets, social media, search, mobility, video. They are all there now. One of the problems I think for researchers and people in this space generally is in the last ten years, we have gone through such rapid technological development that when you do research, it becomes obsolete within a year or two.
I argue that there is a very large opportunity ahead of us in the next five to ten years to have a more stable technology landscape on which to work, and that where things like digital citizenship help is trying to find a common area that has some universality to bring in these discussions.
I think that's some of the observations I would represent from GRID.
The final thing I mention, although we see in the developed world that the Internet is largely getting safer, because of those quality of institutions. In the developing world it's actually getting riskier. We are seeing increased risks, radicalization. We are seeing criminalization in West Africa of youngsters, and its use of the Internet in terms of human trafficking and child labour.
I think the other thing we have to remember is because of those poor institutions, poorer institution quality in those developing countries, there are greater risks. In terms of a global approach to online safety, we need to realise that this is a multi-track world that we live in.
>> ANJAN BOSE: I think that was a very good point that you raised. I don't know if, how many members you have under GRID for the repository of database; how many members at the moment are using GRID?
>> Around 700; quite a lot, mostly online safety professionals as are in this room from about 105 countries.
>> Thank you very much. As we talk about Africa as we are here at the IGF, I'd like to highlight some of the findings from the South African hot line. We have a hot line which is run by the film publication board in South Africa.
Most of us here who have seen and dealt with images of child sexual abuse and so on, we are so familiar in seeing images of white children and some southeast Asian children being shared and distributed amongst offenders and traders alike.
And having worked at the Internet Watch Foundation for several years running the hot line there, I can safely say I very seldom saw an image of a black African child being sexually abused.
However, the findings from the South African hot line are very very different. They are seeing 25 percent of the images that they are dealing with are images of black African children being sexually abused.
Here we see the targeting of countries, regions, as it were, for the dissemination and distribution of these images. It's not just a white western preserve, and it does cover all regions and all areas. For ourselves in the UK, it would be a very small percentage, way less than 1 percent would I ever see of black African children, and for the South Africans to actually see over 25 percent of their images are black African children being abused. It's also fair to say that none of the sites which are hosting this material is actually located in Africa theirselves. These images are being injected in or the sites are targeting Africa, although there is no actual hosting here at present.
But it is a sign of, as the technology advances, so does the crime. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you very much, Adrian, for that information. I think that is very timely, and also related to the research. It points out that we need to tap in the right direction, go to the right people. Yomala had a question or comment.
>> Thank you. I wanted to, I'm representing the Internet safety project in the Ministry of Communications in Egypt. I want to give you an idea about the work we are doing in this stage. We are sort of moving from the on-ground work we used to do with youth, parents and educators groups, to more and more engagement in researches and studies just to guide us on how we should work in the future.
We took part in the GSMA study for children's use of mobile phones, that I think Natasha will give us more details about it. We also took part in an ethnic study done for African countries on child online safety too. We are also keen to keep pace with the latest international trends in the field. We work with international organisations and NGOs like the ITU. We represent Egypt in the ITU Council Working Group on child online protection.
We also work with the regional, whether African organisation, on the Internet safety issue. We work with, I keep safe, and on the, we have this advice Facebook booklet, Facebook guide for parents, and we provided that for a, to be useful for Arab speaking countries and so on. That's it. Thank you.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thanks for sharing all the new initiatives, and as I said, we definitely have identified some patterns here, shifts.
Before we move on to Natasha's presentation, I have two questions, one from our young participant, and one at the back. Be very quick, because I think we have to leave this room in about 15 minutes. I definitely want to give the floor to Natasha to share with us the excellent research that GSMA did. So be very quick.
>> Thank you. I will be quick. I represent ECPAT International and youth partnership project against sexual exploitation of children and in particular online. I just want to highlight one issue that I think we should discuss during the Forum is social networks, because children and youth use social networks to express themselves. And what exactly we have in Ukraine and CIS region that on social networks that hosted in our countries, they can find pornography, even on social networks. And that ratio that children are looking for pornography of course, because they can do it on real life, so that is why they are seeking it in Internet.
And what we have to do, we have to find new methods of work with children online. We have to give them an opportunity to educate themselves through games, I don't know, so they will have no time to looking for pornography when they are staying at home.
>> ANJAN BOSE: What you are suggesting, better options, more empowerment, some quality creative ways of using the Internet, right?
>> Yes.
>> ANJAN BOSE: I think that has come out across the table, that we are striving to give them better services, better ways to pass their time online, and be more creative. Thank you. Valya, and that would be probably the last one for the day.
>> Thank you very much. I'm Miriam Mohir in the ICT and Ministry of Information and Communication in Kenya.
I happen to be the chairperson of the ICT task force. I am really, really encouraged and blessed to be here. Every comment is really making sense to the child in Africa, because what we have been admitted to do by the Government is to address and identify all the challenges of the Kenyon child in the ICT, so that we can help to educate our children, bring them up, measure their talents, and help them to be the people that can lead the nations days to come.
In Kenya, we have adopted a cluster initiative through the triple helix. We are working through the private sector, we are working with the Government, and we also really work with the academias.
So as I sit here, and as I was listening all these comments, I'm just putting it up together to myself saying, I wish we had a Professor in education for history for this, so that they would all bring up, you know, one very good report that will help Kenya to be globally accepted and also globally competitive, as we bring down, reduction of poverty, how we can increase employment, through the children, as we also educate them online. So I am here and I'm very happy. Karibou, Kenya.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you very much for your comments. I think in a way it's satisfying for the whole group to know and to hear you and to feel that all the discussion we have here has impact on the policymakers in this region, and that is really very gratifying.
Very quick, please. I have maybe half a minute.
>> Hello, I'm Yanis from Finland. I represent Electronic Friends of Finland and I'm a vice-chairman and activist in a private youth, youth organisation in Finland. I wanted to promote a workshop, because if there are people here who are interested in what the young people really think about the Internet, there is this workshop 92 in Thursday called challenging myths about young people and the Internet. That is on Thursday, 14:30 in room 11.
14:30, room 11 on Thursday. I wanted to promote that.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you. We will definitely try to be there. Finally, I think, thank you again for all your comments and participation.
I'm not closing now. I'll allow Natasha to come up and present the study. I think it has to be done from there. I don't know if you can see anything on the screen yet. Whoever is directing this, it's there. Thank you.
>> NATASHA JACKSON: Thank you, Anjan. I apologize for being late. I had no idea traffic in Nairobi would be worse today than yesterday.
Before I start, I wanted to follow up on a couple of things that had been pointed out earlier, in relation to the industry work in Europe, on the new set of principles, ICT principles for children. Anjan raised the point that this is European-focused and is there much happening in the rest of the world. There isn't an equivalent of industry coming together across the whole ecosystem in other parts of the world.
There are forums in which industry get together, FOSE is a good example of that, and we try and have those discussions not just in Europe, North America, but last year or earlier this year in Bahrain, and we will do more in the Middle East and other countries. That is an important place. But there isn't the same model. The industry model coming together in Europe is new and has challenges, but it will be interesting to see if it can be replicated in other parts of the world.
One of the reasons that we do the research I'm going to go very quickly through now at the GSMA, which I should have said is the Global Association for Mobile Operators, but one of the reasons we do it is we see research coming out of the U.S. and Europe on children's use of Internet and technologies, and we see less in the rest of the world. And so we try and fill in the gaps.
I was reassured to hear today how many other pieces of research there are. We do try and be consistent, with the questions across countries, so we can do as much comparison, so the work we do is helped by the Mobile Society Research Institute in Japan, which is one of the most advanced countries in terms of mobile use.
We ask questions of children in various countries, between the age of 8 and 18, and we also ask their parents the same questions, and also new questions.
This research is paid for by the mobile operators in those countries, so it's industry-sponsored. But it's carried out by research professionals. Those flags are of the countries we have done in the past. They are varied and countries in different stage of development. We have Japan and South Korea, the most advanced, we have Cyprus, China, Mexico. This year mobile operators in India, Egypt, as we heard, in Paraguay and Japan, carried out the research.
Unfortunately, it is not published until November. But I have snapshots of some of the key things.
What we try and do is ask the same standard questions about children and their mobile phones, what age do they get them at, why do they own them, what reasons do they get them, what are their parents' concerns about them and how children feel about them. This year we also tried to map some of the questions with the questions that were asked on social networking and privacy in Europe by EU Kids Online, which is great research that comes out of Europe.
We took the same questions and asked them in these countries, and in that way we are trying to replicate at least some comparative research across countries.
We asked questions about social networking, whether children have security or privacy protections on their phones, and what they use them for in terms of apps and smart phones.
I'll rush through this. Come see me afterwards if you want to know more. But basically overall, ownership levels of mobile phones by children in the countries we surveyed are up to 94 percent. Egypt was even higher than that. That is the average for 8 to 18-year-olds. In all the countries we serviced -- surveyed, more than 50 percent of children have mobile phones. We saw no correlation between income levels and ownership or usage. It is the myth, it's the most rich families who are giving their kids phones, is not proven in the research.
20 percent of the kids are given used mobile phones, rather than brand-new ones. But again there was not much consistency with income levels on that. Parents who typically either bought a secondhand phone, they also gave their children used phones. But most parents who have brand-new phones also buy their children brand-new phones.
The kids were using much more functions on the phones than their parents, and more than half of them said they use all the functions that are on the phone, whatever is preinstalled on the device they will use. Very few of the parents said that. They tends to use it for calling and messaging.
We found that children have, there were more children with smart phones than their parents. The ownership rate amongst the children was higher than amongst the parents. Some parents are giving their kids smart phones where they don't have them themselves. That was particularly the case in India, Egypt and Paraguay. We also wanted to track tablets, iPads, where kids are getting access to them.
Their use of that is still very low, below 10 percent. But interestingly, Egypt was double the rate of all the other countries. Like Japan was 3 percent, Egypt was around 17 percent.
In terms of mobile Internet, we found 40 percent of children are accessing the Internet from their mobile phones. Of those who have smart phones, 40 percent of them are using it as their main and primary device for accessing the Internet. Once you have smart phones in the hands, it tends to become the primary device.
We asked questions how long they spend on their phones. Some countries, it varies across countries, but in Paraguay, a third of children would say they are spending over two hours a day on the phones on the mobile Internet.
In terms of social networking services, overall, 29 percent of the children that we surveyed were using them on mobile phones. But of those who had mobile Internet facilities on their phones, it was 73 percent. Up to 73 percent of children, so really high uses. These are in countries in which social networking services are relatively new still, and it was significantly higher in countries like Egypt and Paraguay and India than Japan, which is something we were quite interested in.
Children are using more social networking than the parents. They have higher number of contacts than their parents. They have more contacts on their social networking on the mobile phone than they do in the address book. The average was around 100 contacts. But these numbers are all being firmed up for the publication.
We also asked children whether they felt that their friendships had improved since using social networking on mobiles. 76 percent of them said that they had; where they had relationships or friends they didn't see very often, that those friendships had been improved.
We also asked about concerns. We asked of the parents, in terms of concerns about children using mobile phone, it's high, in the 70s or 80 percent for, with one exception, which is about health effects of mobile, which is very low in some countries.
60 percent of parents saying that they have rules about how their children should use the phone, but their biggest concerns were about their children being on the phone too long, and about disclosing personal information. Although we found 80 percent of children who were using the social networking saying they were restricting their public profile to private, that leaves 20 percent with open.
We found children were more protective than we thought perhaps they might be; 60 percent of children are using PINs and passwords on their phones, but less, which was more than their parents. And then we asked children how do they get them, and advice and where they go when they have issues. And with age, they increasingly go to their friends. And very few, really low percentage were looking to schools and teachers for advice.
That was across all age groups. All the stats we have by age, gender and country. This is just a snapshot. We are going to launch this in November. We are trying to encourage operators to do it in as many countries as we can.
Often this is the start of conversations in those companies about children's use of mobile phones and child online safety. We find it a very good way of getting those discussions happening in companies that really are focusing about getting mobile phones out and usage up. So we encourage all operators, particularly in countries where research hasn't been done, to join us.
Sorry, that was very fast. I hope I didn't take too long, but come see me after if you are interested or if you want copies when it comes out.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you very much, Natasha. I think that was a really snapshot of what is happening. A quick question: Did you find a correlation between the using smart phones and the income level? There was no correlation there as well?
>> NATASHA JACKSON: There wasn't a big correlation. It tended to be parents who already had smart phones were also giving it to their kids.
>> ANJAN BOSE: Thank you very much.
I think we have to wrap up the session here, because the next session is going to take place in five minutes. Thanks again for all your participation. And I think it has been quite interesting to know what we are doing right now at the moment, what has been our focus, some of the key initiatives, the key priorities for the next year. And we have already shared some of the, David, John, Jeoung Hee, you did mention some of the initiatives that is coming up. And we hope that this Dynamic Coalition session continues with every IGF and with the recognition that this is the only Forum where all the relevant stakeholders come together, irrespective of the different issues, the different initiatives that we work with, and this is a kind of indication to the IGF at large and all the Governments coming here that we are vibrant, we are here, and will continue to pursue this issue as long as it exists. Right?
So with that, I close the session, and thanks to everyone for participating. Thank you.
(Applause.)
(Session ends at 10:55.)
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