Industry teams up on child safety

AT&T, Qwest, major cable players, two large social networking sites and other technology companies have joined together in a new effort to keep kids safe online and empower their parents in the process.

Project Online Safety will include an educational campaign to promote Internet safety for children through public service announcements and a centralized repository of Internet safety tools and information at www.projectonlinesafety.com. The PSAs are being sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Ad Council.

Among the companies backing Project Online Safety are AT&T, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Qwest, Time Warner Cable, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Facebook and MySpace.com.

As part of its involvement, AT&T also announced AT&T Smart Limits, a Web portal (www.att.com/smartlimits) that brings information for parental control features for all of AT&T’s services, including wireline, wireless, high-speed Internet access and video--into one place. The site will include information on how to set up content blockers, number blockers and other types of parental controls.

“A torrent of information and entertainment comes at us every day from wireless phones and wired phones, from the Internet, and from TV,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chief operating officer, in a prepared statement. “With AT&T Smart Limits, we are giving our customers an intuitive, easy-to-use way of learning how to manage this content and decide what is appropriate for their families, especially their children.”

Project Online Safety is being launched as concerns grow about predators using the Internet to target children, particularly through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Non-profit groups such as the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, the Internet Education Committee and the BlogSafety.com Forum are providing the information that parents need to protect their children online. The sponsoring partners’ resources will be used to encourage the broadcast of the PSAs and fund the distribution of other information as well.

All of the service provider partners in Project Online Safety, as well as other broadband service providers, already offer parental controls as part of their current service. One of the goals of the current effort is to make parents more aware of what is available to them and how it can be used. According to a survey commissioned by AT&T, almost one-third of adults said they didn’t believe they had enough information on how to use parental control tools to protect their kids.