The growing number of children using mobile phones and the increasing acceptance of mobile web bring worries to many parents nationwide regarding the proliferation of malicious content. In response to this growing concern, America’s largest wireless network Alltel Wireless has decided to add a free filtering application starting February 2008.

Dubbed as Alltel Parental Controls, this mobile application is powered by Bytemobile’s Unison ACCESS Mobile content filtering solution. This free service relies on a database of sites related to pornography, gambling, violence, and weapons to give parents total control over their children’s mobile phones. Parental Controls is available for both post-paid and pre-paid users and parents can set the filters via Alltel.com or Alltelu.com.

The content filtering database is provided by RuleSpace. Its “dynamic rating” feature allows Alltel to be updated regularly about all the newly discovered sites which can be potential threats to children. It can also block specific pages on a website if the general content is not inappropriate by nature.

I laud the honest effort of Alltel Wireless to restrict inappropriate contents to mobile phones of many children. One could only hope this mobile application becomes a standard in all mobile phones and all mobile networks. More importantly, mobile networks should not monetize this service so it can be truly effective.

Admittedly, there are different ways for children to access these ridiculous sites via mobile phones. A filtering system is just a barrier to minimize access and not a solution. What is needed is a strong collaboration between mobile networks and the big Internet players like Google and Yahoo!

Via Engadget Mobile

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