MANILA, Philippines—Telco giant Globe Telecom said it has blocked 2,521 sites featuring child pornography as it clamps down on the online exploitation of minors.
Globe said in a statement the sites were identified by law enforcement agencies and endorsed by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) for blocking.
“There is a need for the lawmakers and law enforcers to address certain realities especially on how the internet works in order for ISPs to effectively help in addressing this issue”, Anton Bonifacio, Globe chief information security officer, said in a statement.
“The filtering software can be viewed as an important first step but more needs to be done,” he said. “The digital ecosystem has evolved rapidly and ISPs [internet service providers] cannot win this battle alone,” he added.
Globe said it has invested some $2.7 million in its content filtering system so far.
Internet companies, like Globe, also face challenges as they seek to balance privacy protection while combating sites showing child exploitation and sexual abuse.
“These illegal sites are generally not inside or hosted in the ISP’s servers, just as much as Facebook, YouTube, or Google isn’t,” Bonifacio said. “They are usually hosted in the cloud, or off-shore servers, and fully encrypted, which limits the effectiveness of our content-based filters,” he said.
Bonifacio said the telco is limited on the content it can view “unless we break the encryption, which would be difficult to do without being intrusive to our customer’s devices.”
Still, Globe said it remains active in supporting government efforts in line with the passage of Republic Act 9775.
The law mandates all ISPs to install technology, program or software to ensure that access to or transmittal of any form of child pornography will be blocked or filtered.