Device-level child safety controls to be legislated in UK as deadline expires | #childsafety | #kids | #chldern | #parents | #schoolsafey

The UK government will introduce primary legislation requiring major tech platforms to build device level protections for children that will require age assurance, and explore a law requiring apps that children use to prevent them from accessing or sharing nude images.

The announcement comes with strong words from Lisa Nandy, the UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who, in a recent statement to UK Parliament, says time has run out on Big Tech’s promises that it’s doing all it can to keep kids away from harm online.

Nandy says the current government wants to make the UK a world leader in child online safety, and that the move is evidence that it is acting quickly to do so. “We intend to be an active government that helps to create an online environment that is not just safe, but enabling and empowering,” the minister says.

Three months of work not enough to find alternative solution

In June, the government set out a three-month timeline for major companies to introduce device controls that would prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images. That bill has now come due. Nandy says that since June, the government has “overseen an unprecedented work program with Apple and Google, working with senior leaders and engineers to explore new ways of preventing child sexual abuse and strengthening protections for children online.”

She says both companies have delivered “meaningful changes at the operating level” that makes it harder for kids to create and circulate nude imagery.

But she says, it’s not enough, and that the truth is that “they do not meet the scale of this crisis.” Blackmail and sexual extortion have become a major problem, as kids are targeted, groomed and coerced into taking naked pictures of themselves or generating them using so-called “nudify” apps. “In no other walk of life would we tolerate this crisis harming our children; we will not tolerate it online,” Nandy says.

“For too long, technology companies have failed to protect children from some of the worst harms, and to be frank, I am not prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that progress will continue at the pace that we need it to while harm is being done now.”

“Put simply, we will give tech companies the chance to lead. We will not give them the chance to lag.” The time for planning is over; now is the time of implementation.

That much is clear in the model for the protections, which will be built into every UK device and switched on by default. If a user wants to take, view or send nude images, they’ll need to perform age verification.

According to a report from the Guardian, a nudity block implies the use of “client-side scanning,” where “content is scanned by software on the device before it is encrypted or sent.”

The world is fed up with Facebook

That the scales are tipping against Big Tech is evidenced in part by how the issue transcends party lines. While opposition MPs have questions for Nandy about privacy, scope and execution, there is general agreement that something needs to be done to keep massive global tech companies in line. If anything, opposition MPs want to ensure that the government of new prime minister Andy Burnham is capable of staying on schedule.

Moreover, while social media age restrictions can run into strong arguments over free speech (see the current situation in France) no company can reasonably push back on tools that stop kids from putting explicit images of themselves on the internet.

On this issue, the enforcement threat is also more potent, in that noncompliance can lead to not only fines, but potential criminal liability.

Taken together, what emerges is a picture of a culture that has begun to recognize that certain tech companies have too much power over what kids see online. Indeed, it may be broader than that: Nandy repeatedly mentions wanting to help make technology a social good. The implication is that it is no longer a given that the internet, as it exists – dominated by proprietary Silicon Valley platforms, hobbled by ads, sucking data like an aardvark at an ant farm, breeding extremism – is, at base, a good thing.

There is, equally, recognition that it can be, and should be. What stands in the way are the companies that now find themselves facing litigation, legislation and regulation that implies that discontent with the status quo has finally boiled over.

Article Topics

children  |  device-based age verification  |  UK age verification