Committee urges government and industry to do more to protect children online
- Summary:
- The Communications Committee said that government needs to create a Children’s Digital Champion and introduce better controls for removing online content.
The Committee outlines how children interact with technology through every aspect of their lives, and yet there is a lack of recognition that children have different needs to those of adults in the online world.
The report is broad ranging and outlines how children need better education in school on digital literacy, how the government needs to do better to establish standards and regulations that support children’s needs, and how there should be mechanisms in place for children to make requests to remove online content that they find upsetting.
Commenting on the report, Chair of the Committee, Lord Best, said:
In the past twenty years, the internet has become an all-encompassing aspect of growing up. One Minister described this as "almost the largest social experiment in history". It is in the whole of society’s interest that children grow up to be empowered, digitally confident citizens. This is a shared responsibility for everyone, it is essential that we improve opportunities for children to use the internet productively; improve digital literacy; change the norms of data collection and to design technology in ways that support children by default.
We believe that children must be treated online with the same rights, respect and care that has been established through regulation in offline settings such as television and gambling.
The Government’s Internet Safety Strategy is a welcome start in addressing many of the dangers children are faced with online but action must be broader than a focus on preventing harms, and it must be sustained in the long-term.
A new champion
The Committee said that any future government policy should be based on principles which firmly place children’s rights, wellbeing and needs as the preeminent considerations at “all points of the internet value chain where the end user is a child”. This requires all stakeholders to play their part, the report states, especially considering the rapidly changing landscape that will include the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
The government has a key role in providing a framework for stakeholders to work together to support the needs of children in this area. As a result, the Committee has recommended that it should establish the post of Children’s Digital Champion within the Cabinet Office, with the remit to advocate on behalf of children to industry, regulators and at ministerial level across all departments.
According to the report, Champion’s remit should include:
• establishing and overseeing the implementation of minimum standards of design and practice across the entire internet value chain,
• working with the Department for Education to set the standard of digital literacy and PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic) in all UK schools,
• commissioning research, and
• ensuring existing rights and legislation are implemented in online settings.
Better protections
The government has introduced an promoted an Internet Safety Strategy, with the intention to hold round table meetings with industry leaders. The Committee said that this is an opportunity for the Prime Minister to take the recommendations of its report and hold a summit that would establish minimum standards for child-friendly design, filtering, privacy, data collection, terms and conditions of use, and report and response mechanisms.
These standards should be set out in a code of conduct, which should also promote digital literacy. And if industry fails to implement the recommendations, then government should take action.
The Committee wants the UK to be an “exemplar in raising standards”.
According to the report, the Committee also supports the children’s right to have upsetting content that concerns themselves removed. It said that all businesses operatign online, particularly companies which provide social media and content-sharing platforms, such as Google and Facebook, should respond quickly to requests by children to take down content.
This ‘right to be forgotten’ has proven to be a bit of a disaster for adults, so it will be interesting to see how it works in practice for children.
The report states:
Minimum standards should be adopted that specify maximum timeframes for report and response. Companies should publish both targets and data concerning complaint resolution.
All platforms and businesses operating online should proactively remove content which does not comply with their own published standards.
We recommend that, as suggested by the Children’s Commissioner, her power to request information from public bodies should be expanded to include aggregated data from social media companies and online platforms.
We further recommend that there should be a mechanism for independently handling requests from children for social media companies to take down content. This might take the form of an Ombudsman, as suggested by the Children’s Commissioner, or a commitment from industry to build and fund an arbitration service for young people.
Further to this, the report recommends that all ISPs and mobile network operators should be required to not only offer child-friendly content filters, but that those filters should be ‘on’ by default for all customers.
In response to this, the Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA) has said that filters are “not a panacea” and are only part of a solution that includes digital literacy and sensible policymaking. It said that the report has not understood the full breadth of the ISP market and that it would be disproportionate to mandate filters for ISPs providing services to business or machine-to-machine services or those who make it clear that they offer an unfiltered service.
ISPA Chair, James Blessing said:
The Internet industry has long been committed to keeping children safe online and the UK is regarded as a world leader in this area. We believe the most effective response is a joint approach based on education, raising awareness and technical tools. The Internet industry is constantly reviewing how it helps customers manage online safety and so look forward to being part of the discussions to inform the new Internet Safety Strategy.
Further to filters, the report recommends that the government should establish minimum standards of design in the best interests of the child for internet products. This should be for products that are designed for children, but also for products that attract a large proportion of children.
These minimum standards should require that the strictest privacy settings should be ‘on’ by default, geolocation should be switched off until activated, and privacy and geolocation settings must not change during either manual or automatic system upgrades.
These standards may also require companies to forgo some of their current design norms to meet the needs of children.
My take
Clearly more to be done in this area, and it should be a top priority for the government - protecting the welfare of children online and offline should be right at the top of the agenda. However, in practice this is a complex area that involves a number of stakeholders with conflicting interests. The government needs to take a lead on coordinating efforts and setting standards for how ISPs and online services operate.