New service protects children from adult mobile marketing

The new service lets parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number and email address of their child. The system lets content providers and industry brands, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc act more responsibly and exclude children from adult content and direct marketing. By using the service, content providers can find out if a mobile phone number or email address belongs to a child before access is granted to certain content.

Social networks, websites and instant messaging services can use the new service to make sure that children under 13 years are not allowed to sign up and ensure that underage users don't provide the wrong date of birth when they join.

"I encourage all parents to start using the Child Protect service," says Pieter Streicher, MD of BulkSMS.com and founder of Parentscorner.org.za. "I believe most local wireless application service providers will choose to act ethically if they have an efficient way to exclude minors from adult services.

"It takes less than three minutes"

"It takes less than three minutes for parents to add their child's mobile phone number and associate a date of birth. A verification code will be sent to the child's mobile phone via SMS. The parent's mobile phone number is also verified, so parents will need to have both their phone and their child's phone handy," says Joe Botha, CEO of TrustFabric.

Once a Child Protect record is created it can only be removed if both the parent and child's phone again confirms a verification code and the parent will receive an email if this happens.

"The company already has more than 1000 users and 40 businesses signed up but the success of this service depends on how many people start using it," he concludes.

For more, go to www.trustfabric.com/connect/child-protect/