Vodafone has launched a raft of initiatives designed to protect children and young people and to empower and inform parents as smartphones play an increasingly important role in how families manage their daily lives.

Vodafone Guardian is a free Android app that enables parents and carers to protect children and young people from inappropriate calls, messages and online content. The app launches today in the UK, Egypt, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain, with other markets to follow next year.

Using the app, parents can configure their childrens smartphones to block specific contacts or mobile phone numbers to prevent cyber-bullying text messages or calls. They can also transfer abusive or bullying text messages to a secure folder in the smartphones onboard memory. This folder can only be accessed by the child’s parent or carer, should they need to be used as evidence with a school or the police.
Parents can also restrict outgoing calls to specified contacts only, and specify times during which calls can or cannot be made or received. Time-limits can also be set for the use of specific apps. During no calls or apps periods, use of apps and all inbound or outbound calls can be blocked. Restrictions can also be applied on a contact-by-contact basis.

The app also enables parents to block access to the mobile web at specific times, or at all times. The restrictions apply across all wireless networks, including 3G, wi-fi and Bluetooth. The app can also be used to deactivate the smartphones camera at specific times, particularly when parents are not available to advise young people on what is and it not appropriate to photograph and share online.

Additionally, if the child calls the emergency services, a text message is sent to the parent or carers mobile phone. And calls made by the child to specific counselling hotlines for children, such as Childline in the UK or Protegeles in Spain, are not recorded in the outgoing calls log on the childs smartphone, ensuring confidentiality for the child at all times.

A second free Android app, Vodafone Digital Parenting, for the UK only initially, provides parents and carers with information and advice on how to ensure that children and young people get the greatest benefit from the smartphone revolution, whilst avoiding the challenges and risks which are of concern to parents worldwide. In a separate move, Vodafone has established network-level content filters in nine countries, under which internet content deemed unsuitable for under-18s can be blocked over 3G networks without adult consent.

Finally, Vodafone has revealed that it is to be a founding member of a new pan-European task force, the CEO Coalition, established by the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, to enhance child safety online. There’s more information on this initiative here.

David Murphy writes:
Full marks to Vodafone for taking a lead on child smartphone safety. Over the past few years, we have carried numerous opinion pieces from companies in the mobile security/malware business about the dangers children could be exposed to through normal smartphone usage, and their solutions to them, but from memory, this is one of the first examples I have seen of an operator actually grasping the nettle. (Any operator that knows otherwise, you know where we are.)

The problem Vodafone faces in deploying something like this is, of course, the fact that any smart kid would hate the idea of their parents having any control over who they could call or take calls from, and when and if they could surf the mobile web from their phone. When I went to Android Market to look for the app, I was amused, indeed, to see that alongside the main app, there is an add-on for the app, described thus: “This is a supplementary app which protects the Vodafone Guardian app from being forcibly closed and sends a text message to the Parental Contact if Guardian is uninstalled, or if its settings have been removed.”

It got me wondering whether there is an add-on for the add-on, which prevents the add-on from being uninstalled. The add-on for the add-on, of course, would probably need its own add-on.

Which is the essence of the second problem Vodafone faces in getting the app adopted; namely, that the kids it is designed to protect are much more likely to know about its existence than the parents it is aimed at, and you can bet your bottom dollar that most of them will do everything in their power to stop mum and dad finding out about it. So if there’s a sudden exodus of pay-as-you-go teenagers from Vodafone, with the kids complaining about poor network coverage and 101 other excuses, you’ll know what’s really going on.

That said, Vodafone probably has two objectives in this area. The first is to do something; the second, to be seen to be doing something. The Vodafone Guardian app ticks both boxes. It would be good to see other operators following suit.