At their Council meeting in November EU Culture Ministers adopted conclusions on the protection of children in the digital world. The report assesses how Member States have implemented measures specified in the two recommendations on such matters adopted by the Council in 1998 and, together with the European Parliament, in 2006.
The conclusions underline the need to educate children as well as their parents and teachers about how to be safe on-line. Awareness raising, acquirement of digital competence and media literacy are key tools to enable children to cope with problems they might encounter on the Internet and therefore they should be promoted and strengthened at national as well as at EU level.
The conclusions call upon the audiovisual industry to design their services and products so that the protection of minors is fully taken into account. Member states, for their part, are invited to further implement reporting points for illegal content, as well as to ensure that technological tools such as parental control and privacy settings by default are widely available and user-friendly.
In this context, Commissioner Neelie Kroes reported that she had already organized a meeting with chief executives of the industry, calling on them in particular to promote more consistency in the age rating and content classification systems across the EU