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Jennifer Nelson

A round of applause for Steve Jobs

I’ve not seen much coverage of this issue in the U.S. press, but according to the U.K.’s Guardian, Steve Jobs is committed to keeping pornography off his i-products. 

In April, he said at a press conference: "You know, there’s a porn store for Android [phones using Google’s software]. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there."

In late May, according to The Guardian, he had the following exchange with a writer for Gawker website (a New York news & gossip website):

In an email exchange with Ryan Tate, a writer for the Gawker website, Jobs set out his stall very clearly. Tate, annoyed by an iPad advert calling it a "revolution", challenged Jobs: "If [Bob] Dylan [one of Jobs’s childhood heroes] was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? . . . Revolutions are about freedom," Tate wrote.

Jobs, an archetypal Democrat, replied in a tone that sounded as though he was channeling George W Bush: "Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom."

This effort to keep Apple out of the porn business is not new.  Apple’s developer agreement (for people who develop apps for sale in Apple’s App Store) states the following:  "Materials . . . that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable; [eg] materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory."

I, for one, applaud Jobs’ commitment to keeping Apple family friendly.  It’s hard to imagine life today without the Internet (my kids simply can’t).  But, as I was told by a police officer who works in Internet safety programs, one of the groups that have benefitted the most from the creation of the World Wide Web are pedophiles and child pornographers. Despite parents’ efforts to keep kids safe, pedophiles and child porngrapher spend much more time trying to figure out how to lure kids into their world through the Internet (and sometimes later in person).

So my hat is off to Steve Jobs for being a partner in parents’ effort to keep our children safe in the wireless world we live in.