Background
1. Convinced that the world would never see any end to the mobile revolution,
Broadband India Forum (BIF) brought out National Family Locator and People
Monitoring (NFLPM) after that unfortunate Nirbhaya incident on 16 Dec 2012. BIF
is now contemplating to come out with another innovation for "Parenting of
Children through Insight of Mobile (PCIM)". Actually, PCIM like services, though
not exactly same, are being offered by Verizon and Sprint in US for parents
purely as their MVAS business. Many European operators too are seriously
considering PCIM like services. For a large country like India and all other
developing nations, we need to seriously consider the ramifications of rapid
mobile evolution upon our children.
2. With never ending increase in the use of mobiles for voice, text,
games, apps and web surfing, there is a nonstop urge to explore
newer knowledge, awareness and things instantly by the children
using their mobiles. While this is a great step in quicker learning,
parents are finding it nearly impossible to play their most important
traditional role of parenting their kids as used to be done earlier.
With a phenomenal increase in the number of working parents,
parenting has become very challenging. Children are of
impressionable age and get attracted to new things much faster
without fully comprehending the consequences. There have been so
many cases where unsuspecting children have been targeted by
people who are older than the kids through SMS, MMS, What's App,
calls, videos etc. Games, apps and open web have made things even
worse. The number of children, both boys and girls being sexually
abused and physically harmed, has started increasing rapidly.
3. A quick prevention is that a stitch in time saves nine. If parents can
come to know the mobile usage of their children through real time
and accurate insight, they can instantly exercise control by calling
them and advising against any excessive friendship on phone or even
temporarily lock its usage for some time. When parents return home
in the evening, they can have a very good friendly and advisory chat
with their kids sharing with them the possible dangerous outcome in
case the children continue to do same activities on mobile. This is
what good parenting in time can save many unpleasant situations
with their children. EU is contemplating a law asking all operators in
Europe to provide content filtering service to parents to prevent their
children from seeing objectionable content.
Broad Features of PCIM
4. PCIM gathers insight of mobile usage of the child and instantly
delivers a dash board of activities on the parent mobile or tablet, lap
top, PC or connected TV. The parent has very good idea of the daily
activities of the child in the usage of the mobile which enables quick
parental guidance being given to the child any time. Broadly, the
features of PCIM are:-
(i)
Voice. Call details of called person name, phone No, time,
duration, frequency of calls to the same person, alerts of
calls made at odd hours, alerts of calls made from specific
places, placing of contacts in forbidden list and white list
and so on.
(ii)
SMS. Details of sent and received SMS from unknown
contacts, time of SMS, places from where SMS sent,
frequency etc.
(iii)
MMS. Similar to SMS.
(iv)
What’s App and other OTT Chats. Similar to SMS.
(v)
Apps. Forbidden list of apps, usage of apps, limit to paid
apps etc.
(vi)
Games. Similar to apps.
(vii)
Web sites. Forbidden web sites.
(viii)
Social Monitor. FB usage with forbidden persons.
(ix)
Locking and unlocking of phone. School time or late night
texting and so on.
Conclusion
5. We have known so many cases where tribal girls have been
exploited by the criminals by promising them jobs in towns and cities
and eventually forcing all wrong things upon these young children.
We are convinced that both NFLPM and PCIM together have a huge
import as essential Government To Citizen (G2C) services for safe and
progressive society in developing India.
6. BIF is working on a proposal so that the government can decide
PCIM either as a mandatory service to be provided by all operators or
the government could consider coming out with an essential social
and welfare service like PCIM as a G2C service. India is a large
country with much lower rate of literacy and continuous mobile
evolution is making parenting extremely difficult which might result
into a very large number of unsuspecting kids being abused by
predators giving sleepless nights to parents. We as a nation need to
look into this aspect also very seriously just like NFLPM for family
safety and security. Both family safety and security and prevention of
crime against children do come in the bracket of essential G2C
services. India, therefore, needs to deploy services like NFLPM and
PCIM as essential G2C services which allow full exploitation of
mobiles for managing even the life of a family very well giving
comfort level to the parents.
Broadband India Forum (BIF)
