The Internet Watch Foundation celebrates today its Awareness Day with the support of OPTENET

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK based organization dedicated to combating child sexual abuse content on the Internet and which OPTENET is a member, celebrates today its Awareness Day by promoting an important message of responsibility to young people. The IWF cautions young Internet users that they may lose control of their images and videos once uploaded to the Internet.

This follows a study by the IWF which shows that 88% of self-generated, sexually explicit online images and videos of young people are taken from their original location and uploaded onto other websites.

The study, which was carried out using data collected throughout September 2012 by IWF Internet Content Analysts, aimed to establish a snapshot of how many self-generated, sexually explicit images and videos of young people there are online. It also sought to discover how much of this content was copied from its original source and put on other websites. In less than 48 working hours, IWF analysts encountered more than 12,000 such images and videos spread over 68 websites.

Optenet has been researching and developing different ways to enhance child protection in the Internet for more than 10 years. Optenet has planned and executed research projects that employ Artificial Intelligence techniques to, for instance, automatically detect pornographic images, or to prevent grooming and bullying in Social Networks. These improvements have been incorporated in parental controls currently deployed in more than 100 service providers across the world.

About the IWF

The IWF was established to fulfill an independent role in receiving, assessing and tracing public complaints about child sexual abuse content on the internet and to support the development of website rating systems. Since its formation the IWF has been actively engaged in operating this Hotline service for the public to report potentially criminal content and providing a ‘notice and takedown’ service to advise ISPs in partnership with the Police Services in the UK to effect its removal. The Hotline was formally launched in December 1996 to combat child sexual abuse images and criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK.

For more information, visit: http://www.iwf.org.uk/

About OPTENET

Since its founding in 1997, Optenet has been firmly committed to eliminating the digital divide through effective education and safe usage of the Internet, especially for children. For this reason Optenet works with many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and governmental organisations to implement countermeasures against the constant flow of online threats and to create a secure environment for minors. Our R&D department is always innovating and developing new technologies that safeguard all end-users against cyber-criminals and protect minors from adult content and cyber-bullying.