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Mobile censorship

Phone companies censor the mobile Internet because they don't know whether their phones are being given to children and young adults. But a lack of transparency, mistakes and the difficulty of opting out of the censorship mean that people often find content blocked when it shouldn't be. Here are some of the problems:

• Phone companies do not properly inform adults that they may encounter censorship, or fully explain what is blocked.
• It is difficult to opt out, and people who do are often actually asked to “opt in” to pornography.
• The blocking is simplistic and doesn't really protect younger children.
• Mobile companies don't allow website owners to check if their sites are blocked, and don't make it easy to report when things go wrong.
• Their staff seem poorly trained to help users making complaints.

This is damaging businesses (when a business can't reach its market, for example) and restricts our access to legal and often non-adult material. Mobile Internet access is growing fast. According to Ofcom 28% of UK adults said they accessed the internet on their mobile in the first three months of 2011. Mobile data use increased forty-fold between 2007 and 2010. It is critical that this access to the mobile Internet is not subjected to crude censorship that is susceptible to mistakes or deliberate misuse.  

We want to see more transparency from phone companies, more choice for mobile users and easier ways to report mistakes.

Phone companies should ensure that:

• Every adult is given a straightforward choice at sign up, whether to live with censorship or not. This is often called an 'active choice'.
• Every adult is given clear advice about the kind of content that may be blocked.
• They provide information on how their blocking works.
• Every mobile operator provides clear and easy ways to check if a site is blocked.
• Every mobile operator provides an easy ways to complain about wrongful blocks, including at the time that you find an incorrectly blocked website.

Please help spread the word about how people can report wrongful mobile network censorship. The reports we gather here will be passed on to mobile operators and also added to sites like RespectMyNet.eu, which monitor how Internet companies are interfering with traffic. 

You can read more about censorship in the UK over at our main site here.

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