Yahoo! has long been an industry leader on child safety. In fact, we have made it a company priority to protect children online by creating tools for users to safeguard themselves and by supporting efforts to educate children, parents, and communities about safe online experiences.

That is why we were thrilled that Emily Hancock, Yahoo! Senior Legal Director was recently able to accept an award from the Family Online Safety Institute for her work on behalf of Yahoo! to make the internet safer for everyone.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Left to right - Mike McKeehan, Verizon (FOSI Board Member), Emily Hancock, Yahoo! and María José Cantarino de Frías, Telefonica (FOSI Board Member). "][/caption]

The Family Online Safety Institute Award for Outstanding Achievement (“FOSI Award”) was awarded to individuals who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to advancing the goal of a safer Internet. We could not be prouder to have Emily accept this award. Emily cares very passionately about helping to protect children and she takes a very proactive approach within Yahoo! helping to make changes to products, services, policies and tools whenever possible to achieve that end.  She has been instrumental in the ongoing development and improvement of Yahoo!’s technology for identifying, removing and reporting child pornography.

The award came as Yahoo sponsored the third annual Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) online safety conference, Building a Culture of Responsibility: From Online Safety to Digital Citizenship on November 4th and 5th in Washington, DC. Bringing together leaders from government, industry, education and nonprofits, the conference focused on determining how to best encourage responsible use on the Internet. The conference convened key players from the global Internet community to promote cyber citizenship and coordinate efforts to connect the next billion consumers safely and responsibly.

Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy, Catherine Teitelbaum also played a major role in the conference, appearing on a panel aimed at “Getting Kids Hooked On Safety When They are Young.”  Catherine spoke of her extended tenure at Yahoo!, working to create a safer online environment for kids and teens, and how the work of keeping kids safe has evolved with time. Her dedication to this issue is just another example of how Yahoo! that serves so many different audiences can also make child safety a priority and successfully integrate child safety features into our broad product offerings.

Visit Yahoo! Safely to get the facts about online safety - http://safely.yahoo.com