Vodafone Parents' Guide

Annie Mullins OBE,
Global Head of Content Standards, Vodafone

Dear Parent,

Thank you for visiting our Vodafone Parents’ Guide.

We speak to lots of parents so we understand that you might, at times, feel baffled by your child’s digital world. Young people seem to keep up with new technologies effortlessly – integrating them into their lives just as you thought you were keeping up with them.

As we didn’t grow up with the internet, mobiles and other devices, we don’t have any reference points from our own childhood. But we still want to encourage our children to enjoy the benefits of new technologies for their education, leisure time and future careers and to develop the skills to use them safely and responsibly. Furthermore, we need to help them become resilient when dealing with online risks.

That’s why we’ve created this guide – as a central place where you can go to get to grips with the latest technology, get involved with what your kids are doing online and help them stay in control when it comes to some of the challenges they might face.

This guide is part of our commitment to helping protect you and your family in the digital world and it builds on lots of things we’re already doing at Vodafone, such as:

1. We abide by the European Framework for Safer Mobile Use by Younger Teenagers and Children and the UK Code of Practice for the Self-Regulation of New Forms of Content on Mobiles and we’ve helped create the Teachtoday website containing technology advice for teachers and other members of the school workforce
2. If your child has a Vodafone mobile, you can request Vodafone Content Control or it might already be set as default to restrict access to content that we’ve rated as only suitable for over 18s, such as gambling and erotic content
3. We’ve signed up to the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum (MICAF) Charter and we’re working with the UK Government and the police to tackle mobile theft
4. All our base stations are designed to comply with ICNIRP guidelines in areas where the general public is exposed and we only sell handsets that comply with ICNIRP guidelines for specific absorption rates. We also fund independent World Health Organisation research into the impact of mobiles on health and we’re helping to fund the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme
5. We’re a member of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, which launched the first UK Child Internet Safety Strategy in December 2009, and we also chaired the group responsible for developing the UK Government’s Good Practice Guidance for Social Networking and User Interactive Services
6. We work with the Internet Watch Foundation to report illegal content, such as child abuse images, and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre to assist with the technical aspects of mobile phone use in the prevention and detection of child exploitation
7. We support the International Telecommunications Union’s Child Online Protection initiative
8. We’re a founding member of the Mobile Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Content to prevent users from accessing websites identified as hosting child sexual abuse content
9. Our anti-spam team tries to identify senders of unsolicited text messages and take the appropriate action – this might involve reporting the sender or referring complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner, PhonepayPlus or Ofcom
10. We helped the premium rate services regulator ICSTIS (now called PhonepayPlus) to develop an industry code of practice and we respond quickly to complaints about premium rate services and disconnect their services when necessary
11. We comply with Advertising Standards Authority regulations and the Data Protection Act when it comes to online and mobile advertising
12. We support awareness initiatives, such as Safer Internet Day

If you’d like any more information about the points above, please visit the main Vodafone website.

In the meantime, we hope our Parents’ Guide helps you to get to grips, get involved and stay in control of your child’s digital world.

Kind regards,

Annie Mullins OBE
Global Head of Content Standards, Vodafone