Communications firms summoned to government child porn summit
Culture secretary Maria Miller has summoned the heads of Britain’s largest internet and mobile providers to a summit called in order to find ways of restricting access to child pornography online.
A letter sent by the minister to the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and 3 invites the tech firms to a Westminster gathering in a fortnight’s time.
It comes in the wake of a number of high profile cases in the Uk involving child abuse such as the cases of Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazell – both of whom abused and murdered young girls after viewing child pornography.
Other items on the agenda include the need to tackle extremist material, including violent images and videos, and copyright infringements.
John Carr, a member of the Government’s Council on Child Internet Safety, said that tech firms need to do much more to tackle the issue. He said: “They could, for example, turn safe search on by default. That would block access to all hardcore porn sites. Google could set it up in such a way they’d have to register with them to get an account.
“If these images were not available on the internet then men like Hazell and Bridger might not go on to kill.”