Kuchikomi Feb. 02, 2009 - 01:06PM JST ( 5 )

From Jan 30, NTT DoCoMo began monitoring “dating sites” and other potentially harmful sites to prevent access by users under age 18. Carriers KDDI au and Softbank plan to follow.

The moves are expected to block minors from using their mobile phones to access some 10,000 “deai-kei” (dating) sites, adult sites, SNSs (social network services) and others.

Well then, asks Tokyo Sports (Jan 31) rhetorically, won’t concerned parents at last be able to breathe a sigh of relief that this source of potential mischief has been eliminated?

With these measures in force, members of the sub-18 crowd will only be left with access to the 15 largest sites, such as “Mobage Town,” “GREE,” “gumi” and so on—leaving the majority of the smaller grass roots sites inaccessible. Middle- and high-school students who have used such sites to post their own blogs will no longer be able to access them; likewise for exchanges on bulletin boards.

However, a number of issues remain unresolved.

“In many cases, the students’ parents buy the mobile phones, so the phones are registered in the parents’ names,” explains a sales staff member at a telephone retailer. “A lot of parents do it that way to make sure the kids don’t run up a huge bill. So unless they specifically request filtering service to screen out the undesirable sites, the kids will still be able to get in.”

Others have pointed out that despite monitoring and restrictions, illegal activities may increase on the SNS sites. Because teens will have no choice but to shift to the 15 larger sites that they can still access, it may make them even easier targets for cyber criminals.

The moves come just after two men were arrested on Jan 28 for embezzling funds. They had targeted users of a bulletin board linked to the Mobage Town game site that gave legal advice to financially strapped people on how to settle their debts.

In November 2007, a high school girl who made the acquaintance of an unemployed man via a Mobage-linked dating site was strangled to death.

“Mobage Town had originally been started as a ‘healthy’ free site providing games,” a source familiar with mobile communications tells Tokyo Sports. “But they tacked on extra SNS functions such as blogs and bulletin boards. Since it could be easily accessed by mobile phones, it got lots of young female users. Some say it’s even easier to set up dates with girls in there than through the dating sites. GREE, another SNS, can be used for men and women to meet up for blind dates. But now, both sites are being monitored round the clock.”

Yet somehow, the article concludes, the stringent new measures fail to dispel anxieties over the safety of such sites.