iPhones and Mobile Porn

That porn has gone mobile is no surprise. It was only a matter of time. Europe caught onto the cellular porn craze much sooner that the US, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry there. In the US it’s only a multi-million dollar industry. But the iPhone has made it easier to access porn on a cell phone in the US because with the iPhone you can easily surf the web. Prior to the iPhone only about 6% of cell phone users surfed the web vs. 98% of iPhone users. And with Apples announcement of their new iPhone 3G the web surfing experience will happen 3 to 4 times faster - just what kids need to downloading those big porn movies. Yeah, your kids can do that on their iPhone.   

On the bright side, during Steve Job’s (Apples CEO) announcement last week of the new iPhone he talked about a new enhancement - Parental Controls. The Parental Controls will, among other things, allow you to block access to explicit content on your teens iPhone. When announcing this Steve said, “Some teenagers might not like this but that’s they way it’s going to have to be”. I say “Bravo Apple”. Filtering access to explicit material on cell phones has not been something that has been done very well by other cell phone manufacturers.  With Apple making web access so easy on the iPhone it’s nice to see them stepping up and adding some protection to go along with it.

Some of you are probably thinking, “My teen doesn’t have an iPhone so no worries”. Well not so fast.  Most cell phones have a camera. Often that camera can make videos also. There have been many stories of kids taking pictures of porn with their cell phones and then sharing them at school with their friends. Worse yet, stories are already coming out about kids using their cell phones to take videos of actual sex acts that are being performed on them or their friends. Then they send the video to all their friends cell phones and before you know it most the school has seen it. It’s disturbing that these types of things are happening and sad that kids are getting exposed to so much so young.

So what are parents to do? Get ride of their kids cell phones? No. I don’t think that’s the answer. My teenager has a cell phone and I’m glad she does. We can reach her when we need to and she can reach us. But we do check her cell phone to see what she’s got on there. Cell phones can store lots of photos and videos so it’s good to check (without warning) what your kids might have stored on them. Our daughter cell phone does not have Parental Controls. So she does not have Internet access on her cell phone. It’s not a matter of trust it’s a matter of removing a possible temptation. Plus it would be counter productive to have an Internet Filter on your home computer but give your kids a cell phone with unfiltered Internet access. So see if your kids cell phone can access the Internet. If so, and there is no way to filter it, you might want to have that feature turned off.

Aren’t all the things you have to think about as a parent fun? Just trying to keep up with all the technology your kids are into can be a full time job. I’ll do my best to make your job a little easier.