Posts on the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation, which seeks to reduce the online prevalence of indecent images of children. I was chair of their Funding Council (effectively the industry advisory board) from 2009-2013
October 24th is the annual Internet Watch Foundation awareness day. Discussion of the IWF often highlights, and rightly so, its success in reducing the availability of indecent images of children on the internet. But the most important result of reporting images to the IWF is when the police, notified by the IWF and its peer […]
The annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation was published yesterday. The highlight is news that through closer collaboration with hotlines and Internet industries in other countries, the average time for removal of an illegal indecent image of a child from the Internet has dropped from over a month to twelve days. That is the […]
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published its annual report yesterday, including information on the use of the Internet to distribute indecent images of children. There is quite a lot of good news to report. These images remain a very small fraction of Internet content – fewer than 9000 dealt with all year and only around […]
I’ve been reminded that section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, passed last November, created a new offence of possessing non-photographic images of children that are pornographic and fall into one of a number of sexual categories. When the section is brought into force such images will be classed in the same way […]
The all-party parliamentary communications group (apComms) have published the results of their enquiry into various aspects of internet security – entitled “Can we keep our hands off the net?” – to which JANET provided written evidence earlier in the summer. We responded on two of the five questions, relating to the work of the Internet […]
The Annual General Meeting of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) brought some very positive news on efforts to reduce the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet. Thanks to the self-regulatory action of UK hosting providers only a tiny fraction of illegal images reported to IWF are hosted in the UK – down […]