Britain's Age Appropriate Design Code has made inroads into big tech's dominance
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Because people are apathetic about their own privacy, but parents are hyper-sensitive to any threat to their children, even imaginary ones, which is why governments always use children as the rationale to justify more surveillance and encryption backdoors.
The tech companies don't want that protective impulse to be the trigger that would create a mass movement, which would invariably go much, much further than simply protecting children.
I'm not sure they've completely domesticated the the giants of internet commerce with this one, but it does seem like a step in the right direction.
Those blocks are really unhelpful for everyone but the sites (who get to pretend they don't have children as users) for that reason - they don't stop under 13's from registering, but they do ensure there's no remotely reliable data on who are under 13.
They are too easily influenced and social media makes it easy for them to post stuff that they might later regret. The internet never forgets.
And scrolling social media on their tablets does NOT build any worthwhile technological competency. Yes, in the era of desktop computers having early access to technology was very beneficial but smart phones and tablets are way too dumped down to offer much benefits. The new generations are actually less tech savy than many millennials.
Also making the internet save for children requires for adults to give up too much freedom. A free internet and a child friendly internet do not mix. The need for age verification is already very problematic, allowing for easier identification and tracking.
And yes, again, I know it is not realistic, it would be probably very difficult for children to not participate in social media but still we maybe should talk about how it might not be that great for their development in the first place.
This is the most concisely I've heard it put. As a member of the last pre-Internet childhood generation, now with children of my own, I cannot agree more.
Things used to be better as children. Full stop.
Now we have predatory social and game companies abusing legal but immoral dark patterns for addiction, revenue, and data collection, to the detriment of their users' development, mental health, and lives.
Edit: Here's a direct link to the Code: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
(If on mobile, click on "Contents" on the top left to navigate down to the individual provisions)
I had my screen time limited growing up and I'm grateful for it, because it made me mor patient and allowed me to focus on other stuff. However, even near the end of middle school, it was already getting tough to be social without playing video games or being on social media.
Have you found any of these issues with your own kids, or have things changed for the better in that respect?
There's also an element of communication outside of school. Nowadays (and this is based off of what the kids I work with tell me, so YMMV) it seems that a lot of what students do after school is related to screens. Students talk to each other through Roblox, play Minecraft instead of board games, etc.
It's hard to come up with an analogy because the "in" toy/subject from grade school varies widely by age. At least in my age range, an analogous type of pressure would be Pokemon cards. Talking about Pokemon and playing with the cards dominated most conversations, so not having them made it a lot harder to interact with your peers.
This may be a US thing though, as I'm not super aware of how grade school social standing works in other countries.
It seems to be worst for children with older siblings, who see what their siblings play and ask for it, and as it's already "in the house" the parents are more willing to allow it. I have the same issue with my children as they are a few years apart, the younger one gets disappointed but I try to find different games for him to play.
My kids get one hour of gaming each day of the weekend but there are those in their class who have had free access to a tablet every day from age 6. It's anecdotal, but those do seem to be the ones with most behavioral issues and find it hard to play creatively.
> At break time/recess some of the kids play games based on Brawl Stars & Zooba and if you don't play those then you're excluded.
This is ultimately the fundamental issue. The trade-off between social involvement and behavioral development is really difficult. In your opinion, do you think that limiting their screen time has had a significant negative social effect? Or has limiting their screen time actually had a positive effect on their social skills?
Adding on to that, do you personally think that the social trade-offs are worth the behavioral gains associated with limiting their screen time? Or is there some piece I'm missing where limiting screen time is actually beneficial to both?
This isn't meant as a judgement of your parenting style if it comes off that way. I'm just genuinely curious about what trade-offs you see with your style versus other parenting styles. As someone who grew up similarly to your children, I certainly never regretted missing out on video games as a kid. I do recognize that times are changing though with respect to video games and the Internet.
We have tried introducing some TV during the week and the negative effects were very noticeable. There's a lot of creative energy that needs to be used and screen time doesn't fulfil that, even Minecraft.
At school the group of children who play creatively is bigger than the group who play based on games, so it's not making them total pariahs. I also think it is teaching them to be able to cooperate and negotiate within an open and shared play environment, which I see as the foundation for how they'll interact when they are older.
You still can though? In fact I've found that's the single best low-pass filter for games: nothing with any sort of online connection requirement or in-game real money purchases. Actual classic content expansion packs available to buy in the store, sure, but absolutely nothing consumable in-game of any kind whatsoever. That immediately cuts through an enormous amount of dross in one quick check while still leaving more great content then one could fully play in a lifetime. I just wish more stores (and would support a legal mandate for it) had options to filter all that out completely so it never even gets displayed. I don't want to see a single "free" game ever. Outlawing gambling in smartphone and console games entirely would be even better, but I'd settle for rock hard filters.
So yeah, the same old thing as always works: simply buy a game, and that's it. The only change is that you do need to look if you can simply "buy a game and that's it", but it's not as if those have gone away.
Includes in-app payments, requires online connectivity, requires external identity, collects data, monetizes data, includes ads, etc.
Like nutritional information for software.
That way, your child plays the games that are safe, your childrens friends parents don't have to do the work and nobody has to have FOMO.
This is the most counterintuitive thing that most people don't realize. Early screen exposure to addictive digital content actually reduces the chance that your kid will become a genius with deep understanding of the underlying tech. Early computers were about building, not consuming.
While I agree with this, I'm also skeptical about people trying to cajole a generation to shield them from all that is bad or evil. Growing up, there were a great many things I was not allowed to do, including surfing the net - coz expensive and also so that phone lines would be open.
Every generation tries this futile attempt to thrust their opinions authoritatively on the next. All these kids growing up dealing with ads and interstitials could surprise us by, say, being totally immune to advertising.
There were boogiemen in the past. In some respects it was legitimate and in some respects in was overblown. But you have to know the child as an individual to know which category it falls into.
"Inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue"
"Hey Mikey! He likes it."
I still have these committed to permanent memory and will probably carry them to death.
How early are we talking about? I'd go out on a limb and say that most kids who owned Commodore 64s (for example) never got much further programming than LOAD “*”,8,1
My sample size, granted only about a dozen of Commodore 64 and Apple ][ owners, says 100% got at least as far as typing programs in from magazines. More than half made programs to calculate things, about a third made their own video games.
Of the total, at least half are engineering now (software, energy, communications), and the video game segment are software engineering leadership.
It's not clear to me how to replicate this experience today, though I applaud games such as Human Resource Machine:
https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine
More, all over the map though: https://shecancode.io/coding-games
I think there's something to be said for exposure to coding as a kind of digital literacy that should be required going forward, in a "WTF even is code anyway" sense.
I think it's impossible to reproduce that experience exactly today, because any modern attempt has to compete with many other sources of digital distraction.
Minecraft and Roblox probably come closest. (And do a decent job in modern terms.)
I suspect psychological, emotional, and digital content literacy - understanding how games and media manipulate beliefs and influence behaviour - is much more important than coding skill today.
What I could see is a few layers of selection bias, as in, expat children of expat parents that would work in third world and buy their children computers and put them in an expat middle school.
Or, more broadly, consider how historically common it is to choose the same profession as a parent. Access to the unrestricted internet can let you discover fields that may not have even existed when your parents were in college and even try them out (see also https://xkcd.com/519/).
If we had stronger cultural norms of collectively raising children in the village (the whole village, not just a church of specific beliefs and traditions that attracts the like-minded), this argument wouldn't be as strong, but we don't.
For example sex education is part of the curriculum of my country and teaches without judgement about the different forms of sexuality and how to safely engage in sexual activities. I know some states in the US teach "abstinence only" which I would not call education but a crime against those children. The internet can only be a band aid here.
Same with finding a profession. That is why schools teach children all the subjects and offer additional activities so they can find out what they like.
- Unrestricted access to 4chan and Fortnite is net bad
- Unrestricted access to Wikipedia is net good
The Internet as some amoral ocean of voluntarily accessed objective knowledge is such an unbelievably naive old meme by now that it is extremely disappointing to still see it crop up on HN. Humans have sorely limited attention bandwidth, and we live in a world where every bad actor (including even the Taliban https://old.reddit.com/r/MalangKhostay/ ) has learned how to game attention to push every manner of ideological garbage down our throats in tiny increments. As an adult it's almost impossible to avoid falling prey to influencing tactics on a daily basis, why would we expect children to be more adept at navigating a global and almost completely unregulated media machine?
This is a great point. In the ~2000-2007 era computers were easy and widepsread enough to be open to a large demographic, but not dumbed down enough that they were no longer general-purpose computing platforms, transformed into corporate walled gardens like today's smartphones.
They can go to church if they want to but should not be pressured to go. They don't belong in religious fundamentalist churches though.
I have come across many adults who skipped all the steps on this healthy progression into adulthood.
We had to pry the child away from reading all day yesterday to go outside.
The secret: No internet, no video games, no TV (except an occasional animal documentary or episode of Cosmos... but this is once a month or so).
I'm in tech, and I very much look forward to sharing what I know and what I love about computers and computer gaming. But not yet. Reading, writing, math, science, history, music, arts, crafts first, and no indoctrination... just learning to learn, and learning to think.
Is there any chance that such an approach, extended too long, may result in addictive behavior when confronted with the huge effect of instant access to media and online discussion?
Kids pick up things at school no matter what. They'll also have more in common with other smart readers, a good thing.
I personally never used the internet until I was in my mid twenties and took to it like a duck to water. Tend to laugh when folks imply you had to use it as a toddler to grasp it. True learning is substantailly different than wasting time with consumer products.
An example. My kid didn't know who the kardashians were until about age ten or so, and really doesn't know much more now. That's a good thing. Garbage culture is not a thing to spend much time on.
even its creator thinks their product is creepy: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-43718059
maybe it's time to force dog-fooding: if you would not feed the product you have made to your own children, why are you selling it to others?
As usual, it's not a technological problem. There's no point being surprised that both kids and adults are harmed by online activity in a culture where making as much money as possible is always the primary goal, irrespective of consequences.
The thing with Capitalism though is that it's going to harvest as much income as it can while public opinion is still undecided (legislation often trails public opinion) and even going so far as to try to delay changes in public opinion.
To be fair, the internet was way different back then (pre-2000 era)
He's had his computer in the same room as me for years and is only now (at 12) given some privacy online.
I know - from hearing and reading his conversations - that he and his friends are well versed in being cautious. If anything, they're far more cautious than I was when much older. E.g. the moment a stranger is on a voice channel when in some online game they'll cautious each other to avoid even first names, or rough location, and I've hard them descend on some poor unsuspecting person who dared ask one (innocent) question too many.
With respect to social media, he doesn't use it. Partly because he's not yet interested much. He's aware of them, mostly via youtube videos of people pointing out all kinds of pitfalls people have gone in.
He delights in showing me youtube videos of people showcasing people dumb enough to give out too much information, or posting things they shouldn't. Generally he's far more shocked about what stupid stuff people do online than I am.
He installed an ad blocker of his own accord, because he was tired of being bombarded by ads he was suspicious of. He's absolutely paranoid about viruses. He'll be far quicker to assume something is a scam than I am.
I know this is just one anecdote, but I think if you spend time talking to kids growing up with the internet now, they understand the net much better than you might think. Not all of them, certainly, but a larger proportion seem to understand it now than when I started using the net, where people still readily gave out their phone numbers to total strangers in chat rooms for example.
As for being influenced, I'm not at all convinced that kids would do worst, or even that badly on being influenced by social media.
Listening to my son and his friends, if anything net access have made them far more sceptical about not just the net but everything than my friends were growing up - my son and his friends have been bombarded with conflicting messages for years, and so they are very vary about which sources they believe, while most of my friends growing up would inherently trust whatever news source their parents preferrred and had no experience in understanding media bias or questioning the veracity of a source.
> Also making the internet save for children requires for adults to give up too much freedom. A free internet and a child friendly internet do not mix. The need for age verification is already very problematic, allowing for easier identification and tracking.
The faulty premise is assuming we need to make the internet "safe". The real world is not safe. Children mostly do just fine because we don't let them into it without supervision and without teaching them to take precautions. It's not perfect, but it works well enough, and it'll work better once more parents have grown up with the internet from an early age themselves.
It is talking to them, teaching these lessons about privacy, and computer science as kids. Then showing them how to get online safely more and more over the years as they approach eighteen.
I don't think there was ever a pillow or blanket fort as a child where the parents weren't briefly invited in to see what we did, and I don't think it's quite the same thing to show off your Animal Crossing island on the TV. We could probably find more inclusive ways to do it, especially for games that are skewed younger, during earlier developmental stages.
DRM gets a bad rap because of its previous use in limiting user rights to things they bought (and owned), but here, in this use case, perhaps DRM has a better use case.
Not in GDPR land.
(1) Best interests of the child: The best interests of the child should be a primary consideration when you design and develop online services likely to be accessed by a child.
(2) Data protection impact assessments: Undertake a DPIA to assess and mitigate risks to the rights and freedoms of children who are likely to access your service, which arise from your data processing. Take into account differing ages, capacities and development needs and ensure that your DPIA builds incompliance with this code.
(3) Age appropriate application: Take a risk-based approach to recognising the age of individual users and ensure you effectively apply the standards in this code to child users. Either establish age with a level of certainty that is appropriate to the risks to the rights and freedoms of children that arise from your data processing, or apply the standards in this code to all your users instead.
(4) Transparency: The privacy information you provide to users, and other published terms, policies and community standards, must be concise, prominent and in clear language suited to the age of the child. Provide additional specific ‘bite-sized’ explanations about how you use personal data at the point that use is activated.
(5) Detrimental use of data: Do not use children’s personal data in ways that have been shown to be detrimental to their wellbeing, or that go against industry codes of practice, other regulatory provisionsor Government advice.
(6) Policies and community standards: Uphold your own published terms, policies and community standards (including but not limited to privacy policies, age restriction, behaviour rules and content policies)
(7) Default settings: Settings must be ‘high privacy’ by default (unless you can demonstrate a compelling reason for a different default setting, taking account of the best interests of the child).
(8) Data minimisation: Collect and retain only the minimum amount of personal data you need to provide the elements of your service in which a child is actively and knowingly engaged. Give children separate choices over which elements they wish to activate.
(9) Data sharing: Do not disclose children’s data unless you can demonstrate a compelling reason to do so,taking account of the best interests of the child.
(10) Geolocation: Switch geolocation options off by default (unless you can demonstrate a compelling reason for geolocation to be switched on by default, taking account of the best interests of the child). Provide an obvious sign for children when location tracking is active. Options which make a child’s location visible to others must default back to ‘off’ at the end of each session.
(11) Parental controls: If you provide parental controls, give the child age appropriate information about this. If your online service allows a parent or carer to monitor their child’s online activity or track their location, provide an obvious sign to the child when they are being monitored.
(12) Profiling: Switch options which use profiling ‘off’ by default (unless you can demonstrate a compelling reason for profiling to be on by default, taking account of the best interests of the child). Only allow profiling if you have appropriate measures in place to protect the child from any harmful effects (in particular, being fed content that is detrimental to their health or wellbeing).
(13) Nudge techniques: Do not use nudge techniques to lead or encourage children to provide unnecessary personal data or weaken or turn off their privacy protections.
(14) Connected toys and devices: If you provide a connected toy or device ensure you include effective tools to enable conformance to this code.
(15) Online tools: Provide prominent and accessible tools to help children exercise their data protection rights and report concerns.
[0] https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/guide-to-data-pro...
This is super based I just wish the UK government would be as transparent with their citizens when they monitor us.
EDIT: apparently I'm talking about a 2nd, not directly related, bill. See one of the grandchildren comment.
And there was me thinking this was going to be another example of toothless go-nowhere governmental posturing.
The code of practice was put together by the ICO and not especially publicised, so it ends up being reasonable and proportionate. The "online safety bill" is the conservative side of the UK having yet another go at restricting porn, which will probably fall apart like the last one.
This regulation bans nudging towards a particular goal. That's something that can be legislated for (and would clearly include advertising.)
Yes, 100%. Advertising is nothing but an unproductive arms race for who can deliver the biggest assault on your mind and your attention. Your life would be better, and all your products cheaper too.
A good 95%+ of them are a cancer upon society and even our planet though. I find it insane that we are told to behave as responsible consumers while there is a multibillion dollar industry which sole purpose is to change consumer's behavior.
> Tasked by the Department of Work and Pensions to investigate the effectiveness of "sanctioning" recipients of disability benefits (punishing them with fines of up to three years ineligibility to benefits for supposed bad attitudes or non-compliance), the nudge unit noted that these methods were ineffective, but rather than recommending they be withdrawn, proposed changes which might make sanctions and benefit conditionality more effective