Intelligent risk management for children and youths in the digital age – WS 05 2014
13 June 2014 | 11:30-13:00
Programme overview 2014
Session subject
- positive aspects of the current situation
- future developments and resulting challenges
- options to react and to cope with the challenges
- innovation and progress
Session description
In respect of the legal framework of children's rights (freedom of speech and information, privacy and the right to grow up in a safe and secure environment) and parents and other adults' duties to care and educate intelligent risk management for children and youths in the digital world must build on different pillars, i. e. positive content, parental control by technical means, safety by design, empowerment of children and youths.Overall, measures aimed at protection of minors need to be applied in a broad social and ethical contexts, combining application of new technologies, parental oversight, education, social services, law enforcement, and self-regulatory policies by social networks and ISPs. The workshop will invite 4 speakers to give a short statement of the status quo each speaker towards one of the 4 pillars (5 min each). By means of an appreciative approach the workshop participants will then discuss: positive aspects of the current situation, future developments and resulting challenges, options to react and to cope with the challenges, innovation and progress. The debate shall cover technical aspects as well as societal developments and the legal and political framework. See discussion
People
- Focal point: Jutta Croll, Zentrum für Kinderschutz im Internet - I-KiZ
- Live moderator: Jutta Croll
- Rapporteur: Regina Henke
- Remote participation moderator: Katharina Kahmann
- Digital facilitator: Lorena
- Panelists/speakers:
- John Carr, eNACSO
- Lidia de Reese, fragfinn
- Elizabeth Milovidov, Child Rights / Internet Safety Advocate
- Narine Khachatryan, Safer Internet Armenia
- Sabine Frank, Google Deutschland
- Tilman Gräter, I-KiZ
- Lennart Nickel / Luca Troncone, klicksafe Youth Panel
Format of this working group at EuroDIG
Workshop. World cafe
Protocol. Discussions
Further reading
Messages
Reporter: Regina Henke, I-Kiz (Zentrum für Kinderschutz im Internet)
- Positive Content production shall be encouraged. It is not produced sufficiently by conventional business models; public subsidies for positive content are needed. Young people themselves shall be empowered as creators of content.
- Parental Control by technical means can be useful to a certain age. The best interest of the child shall be in the foreground. Parents need to learn how to apply technical control in a balanced strategy of child protection and children’s rights.
- Safety by Design can be established through safety impact assessments based on guidelines developed with respective industry standard organizations and accompanied by awareness campaigns for the users.
- Empowerment of children and youths needs education of the parents, so that they can educate the children. Parents need to set restrictions, but they also need to understand that young people need some time without limits to learn their OWN limits.
Video Record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKZAyYTPylE
Transcript
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Okay then, the door is closed. Welcome, everybody, to this session. It’s the Workshop number 5, Intelligent Risk Management for Children and Youth in the Digital Age. My name is Jutta Croll, manager of the Child Center Protection on the Internet and there we mean child in the sense of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, that means everybody up to the age of 18. So I really appreciate that we have lots of young people as well here in the room talking about risk management for this age group.
We were asked to have the workshop as an interactive session, and I have been to the other workshops during yesterday and this morning, and so I think we will be a little bit more interactive than some of the other sessions. And I hope that all of those people gathering around at the walls will then join into the table because we have planned to do the session as a word cafe, although we then had to learn that we cannot move the tables in these historic rooms so we need to cope a little bit with the situation.
We have for a speaker, panelists sitting in each of the corners and I will introduce them to you when it’s their turn to explain the topic they will deal with at the corner of the table. So first of all, I will just say something about what is this workshop about? And what do we mean with intelligent risk management? And we intended to debate with you how we can see in respect of the legal framework of children’s rights which are freedom of speech and information, but also the right to privacy can on the other hand be in a good coalition with the duty of the parents to take care for their children and to safeguard them in their growing up and also to safeguard them in the, in their digital life.
So we want to talk with you about how we can bridge these Rights of the Child, and the duties of the parents, and how this process, this big task can be supported by different means. So we will talk about what can be done with positive content, which role can parental control by technical means play? What is safety by design? Could that be an approach that will help parents in the process of safeguarding their children, and what about empowerment of children and youths themselves?
How can we make them resilient to be able to grow up in the digital age and to benefit from the huge opportunities that digital media provide to them? So I would like to first start with the corner there on my left. That’s Carr an expert on child protection on the internet but uses of children and youth on the internet and a fighter against the digital wide always calling for equal opportunities for all children for more societal groups. And then we have Lidia de Reese, and she will explain what that means. Would you mind to give that a start, John?
>> JOHN CARR: I need the microphone for it to appear on there. Yes, I don’t need it to be heard.
>> JUTTA CROLL: You need it also to be heard by the remote participants, so everything that’s spoken into the microphone can be heard or read by the remote participants.
>> JOHN CARR: So there are lucky people taking part that don’t actually have to look at me. How fortunate for them compared with others. So, yes, so here is a kind of opening and an obvious point. And I kind of referred to it yesterday as well in my intervention. If you remember Robert, the Russian guy, said young people shouldn’t be treated as a special interest, and that’s not exactly what he meant because he was referring to young adults really because he accepted, if you remember, when I asked from the floor, he accepted that children, that’s to say people under the age of 18, are in a special and different class from people who are aged 18 or above.
People aged 18 and above in international law, adults and you will be glad to hear I have nothing to say about what adults do on the internet, at least not in that particular connection. So children have legal rights to access the information. They have legal rights, I’m speaking under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are other instruments as well, but that’s the founding legal document which every country in Europe has signed up to. So children and young people have a legal right to access information.
They have a legal right to express their opinions, a legal right to associate with others, and there is no qualification or subtraction ascribed to the internet. In other words, those rights which have existed from the moment that Treaty came into existence, which is 25 years ago now, apply equally in the online space as they do in the real world. So this is not a discretionary matter. It’s not something which adults because they choose to, will allow children or young people to do. They have a legal right to it.
I think that’s an important starting point. Now, it has to be said that that right is qualified to some degree because precisely because they are children or younger persons, they don’t always have the same knowledge. They don’t always have the same worldly experience as older people do, so states also have a right, I’m sorry, an obligation, not a right, an obligation to make sure that children, young people in the real world and in the on line world are not put in peril or not put in danger by being exposed to inappropriate content or inappropriate individuals or they are ripped off through scams and things of that kind. So there are two things that need balancing.
And unfortunately, what we often hear about is what children shouldn’t do. We have filters to block access to content which is forbidden or not considered to be good. What we very rarely hear about is the positive content, the positive materials, the good things that are on the internet which children and young people can benefit from and if only they knew about it or only if, if they were only directed towards it.
And it’s a great pity that parents don’t, are not so aware of that aspect of the internet as they are about the bad stuff, because they are experienced enough that if you direct children or if you point children, young people towards positive content that they find engaging or they find useful or that they find to be fun, that’s where they will go. It’s only, or very often it’s the case that kids end up in bad places because they don’t know where the good places are.
So we all have a big job and big responsibility to develop positive content, to make it available and widely promoting it not just to, obviously to the children and young people themselves, but also to their parents and to teachers and so on. And it shouldn’t always be a conversation about don’t look at this, don’t go to that site. Don’t do this.
One of the reasons why this is important, by the way, is that there is a myth around that every child or every young person, that’s to say basically most of the human race that are not as old as me, is a super cool dude or dudette whichever the phrase is who is completely happy and relaxed about going on the internet. They are constantly out there looking for this experience or that experience. It’s note true.
If you look at the research done by Sonia Livingston and others as well, a lot of children, young people are just as conservative with a small c in the use of the internet as adults are. In fact, they tend to go to a relatively small number of sites, a relatively restricted number of sites. Now, of course, there are plenty of young people around who are uber users or super cool Nerds and that stuff, but the majority are not like that. They stick to sites they know their friends are son and they are not experimenting as much as I think the popular imagination would have us believe, and newspaper reports would have us believe.
And, again, that’s perhaps a sign of their lack of awareness of a lot of the positive stuff and a lot of the good material that’s are out there, and it also indicates the importance of making sure, therefore, that they are. We are only supposed to speak for a few minutes at the beginning you will be glad to hear. So I will start winding down a bit.
There is a level at which this question becomes slightly, well, redundant maybe. 38% of 3-year-old and 4-year-old children in the United Kingdom, and I’m sure it’s the same in Germany and elsewhere, 38% of 3-year-old and 4-year-old children are regularly accessing the internet. 6% of 3-year-old and 4-year-old children are accessing the internet through a tablet device which is considered to be theirs. This is 3-year-old and 4-year-olds accessing the internet through a tablet.
And those figures, by the way, they were published in Britain based on research that was completed in October of last year, in other words, before Christmas of last year. Now, at Christmas of last year, the number one electronic device that was being sold to parents to give to their children was a tablet. And the reason for that was several companies have now brought out very inexpensive tablets, you know, there is one for 40 pounds, 50 Euros with full internet connectivity.
The graphics are not brilliant, but nonetheless, that’s the way prices have been going, so my guess is now the proportion of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in Britain who have their own tablet and are accessing the internet well have gone up considerably.
It’s difficult when you are speaking of children of that age to have the same sort of discussions as you would about the rights of some of the young people, dare I say children. Young people who I can see sitting around this table. You can’t apply the same rules to a 3-4-year-old as you can to 16, 17-year-olds and that’s absolutely clear. The next thing I’m going to say, many of you in this room will find very, very hard to believe, but I promise you it’s true.
I am a grandfather. I know, I know, you are saying, how could he be? He looks so young! I’m a grandfather. My granddaughter is now 10 months old, about three months ago.
Congratulations.
>> JOHN CARR: Thank you. Three months ago my daughter, her mother, put her iPad on the floor in the living room on the carpet, and my granddaughter crawled across it and somehow her foot and her hand managed to press the two bits of the screen which allowed her to take the youngest ever selfie. I have a selfie of my granddaughter’s nostrils. She hasn’t yet worked out how to make an email attachment of it, and she doesn’t have a Facebook account to put it up on yet, but the point, the serious point in that story is, of course, younger and younger people are using these devices.
And I think the discussion that we have about very young children using these technologies has to be different from the discussion we have about older ones.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you, John. Lidia, would you like to just explain what positive content in the sense of fragFINN means.
>> LIDIA DE REESE: Thank you very much, I will keep it short. So I will briefly talk about fragFINN, which is a search engine for children. We are focusing on very young children up to the age of 12 years, and we, what we try to do is you want to give them a very positive on line experience when they start using the internet. We want them to learn how to use it, how to build up their competences, but also to let them participate on line and to make themselves heard.
So that’s how we built up this search engine for children which is based on a white list. So children using this search engine can only find the 11,000 websites we checked beforehand and put into the search and index of this search engine, and this is there safe surfing environment, but they are invited to participate to make the environment bigger. They can send us links to websites which are not included yet and we will check this and try to include the websites which are still missing into this search engine.
That’s something we find is very important that there is also or already a lot of positive content and services out there, but it’s very hard for children and parents to find. John said this already. So we think starting points for children on the internet are a crucial thing. They need starting pages, search engines, communication, video platforms. We have a good one in Germany. So platforms and websites which are only made for them, specifically made for them, but which enable them to take part and to be creative on the internet.
And another important thing is to give producers and developers of on line content and services good advice on how to make great content for them so that’s a very important thing we work on fragFINN, but on the European project of Post Con we made a set of guidelines for producers they can turn to and have this checklist to see what can I think about if I want to do a website or communication platform, what do I have to think about to make it good and safe for children to use.
>> Thank you, Lidia. If I’m right, it’s when parents want their children, want to insure that their children only surf on the fragFINN white list, they need to use also technical tools to be sure that you not only recommend your child go to fragFINN, but that you insure that they only can use these websites. And I think that turns us to the next speaker, which is Elizabeth Milovidov, and I’m not sure whether I am able to pronounce your Russian surname, Milovidov. Yes, because you are accompanied by Narine Khachatryan, and that’s also difficult for me to pronounce. Narine comes from Armenia, and both come more from the educational part, I would say, than from the technical part. But nonetheless, you are supposed to talk about how education can be supported by parental control by technical means and the role that can play. Do you have a microphone?
>> ELIZABETH MILOVIDOV: Thank you. First I want to say I do agree with John that we should point children to positive content. But the reality is that will there is a lot of things out there that children and especially young children, not you guys, that they shouldn’t see, there are pornographic sites, hate sites, anorexia, self harm, cutting, et cetera. And I think that while communication and involvement is great, which is one of the things that I do is I coach parents on how to be more involved in their children’s lives.
I think that younger children, they may need a hand and they may need a hand by technical means. John had mentioned earlier a statistic about the 3 to 4-year-olds in the U.K. There was an interesting statistic earlier this year that said one in four young people say they saw online pornography by the age of 12. Of the 1,000 people that were questioned, 7% were ten or younger when they first saw internet porn. I think that’s a segue into our topic on parental controls by technical means.
This originated in the 1990s actually for parents to have some sort of control. Now, we find those types of controls on televisions, laptops, computers, gaming consoles, mobile phones. Basically there are five main functions of parental controls. We see content filtering, privacy protections, monitoring, use restrictions and content management. When you come and we discuss in our workshop we will talk about each of the functions and how we can weigh it against the Rights of the Child, the rights to freedom, privacy, expression, and, again, we will look at it in juxtaposition with parental duties. What should parents be doing? After saying that, I will let Narine Khachatryan say a few words.
>> NARINE KHACHATRYAN: Thank you very much. I would like to focus more on empowerment issues since very protective approaches are not dominating in our country, and people believe that education and training can become much more helpful than parental control tools. Of course, we are not speaking of very small children, but starting from 10, 11-year-old children are very easy to handle those filtering tools and that is why more and more teachers and educators are focusing on educational measures.
And I would like also to speak of the challenges which, of the challenges which are coming this new intelligent technologies and the skills which are necessary to meet those challenges. And the first challenge that we need, children need first to muster the proper skills to take advantage of such technology of internet of things, semantic web, big data, which could be very helpful for education and development, but at the same time, they may become very manipulative, and I would like to bring some examples of their personalization which is now presented as a very, something very positive.
This is technology which is offering tailored advertisement based on information gathered about users’ on line behavior or predictive behavioral targeting which is targeting advertisements based on predictions about users’ future behavior, and their interests. And at the same time, off line data can be incorporated into on line targeting, and people are often not aware of the full impact of those technologies.
And what is important that people very often do not aware that they are not only offered goods or services based on personal preferences, but also news. So the recent researchers have shown that most people are aware that search engines produce neutral results. And what risk do we see here? So due to web personnization people become less and less confronted with views that do not coincide with their own views and structure makes it difficult for challenging voices to meet us. And consequently, people become, online discussion groups become more and more polarized and there is a risk that people can be trumped in their way of thinking, locked up in their beliefs, stereotypes or prejudices.
And a number of other manipulative techniques which we see a little bit, I’m not afraid of the word, dangerous, just perception management, video manipulation, deliberate disinformation or manufactured false realities, and we think, we believe that young people need to have, need to develop high level critical thinking skills in order to wisely search, select, and critically evaluate information coming from various sources.
And this is the search challenge for us. And, of course, the first challenge is related to fostering security and privacy consciousness among young people and we try to do this in our country. We think topics related to censorship, surveillance, data protection can be integrated into training programs. Young people need to be aware that, for instance, surveillance technologies which are installed in shops for public safety purposes can be used for advertising or young people need to be aware that they can be spied on line by playing given online games.
So I will be short and conclude with the fifth challenge, which is that to teach young people about their rights on the internet and all of those competencies should be, should help young people to avoid manipulations of new intelligent technologies and to fully participate in their societies and gain from all of the education and learning opportunities.
Thank you very much.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you, Narine. Before we come to the two young guys that we have for the topic of empowerment in children and youth and ask them whether they feel educated about all of these things and also the technical threats that you have mentioned, I would get back to what Elizabeth said about we have these different devices with which children can access the internet, children and young people, and we also have for the parents the task to manage that all.
And at the moment, we have a situation where most of the parental control tools work on one device or maybe on the other, but we don’t have an integrated solution that can help parents to cope with that situation. And we all know that children are much more into the technical things. They understand better in many cases, and so it’s a huge task for parents to understand how they can manage and give this safe environment to their children on all of the different devices.
One idea is the idea of safety by design, and now I get to Tilman Grater, who is one of my colleagues at the German Center for Child Protection on the Internet, and Sabine Frank who both want to explain safety by design to you.
>> TILMAN GRATER: Is this the appropriate volume for this room? Thank you. Thanks for the chance to talk here and John Carr has mentioned the Christmas present of tablets for minors before, and I want to take this as a start for the topic and the question of safety by design. I have prepared a little animation here. You all know these lovely devices, a tablet computer. And now I think the animation won’t start so would you be so kind to – thanks.
There is good reasons parents don’t mind handing these to their children. On the surface, there is no sharp corners, you won’t see cables here. There is small sockets only, so small fingers won’t fit into it in comparison to a decent desk top computer. So but the question is what about safety inside? And this leads us to safety by design. Safety by design is a principle that has been discussed recently at the eKids expert groups and media and safety by design – here we go.
Safety by design is a principle about taking care of protection of minors as soon as in the development of products putting yourself questions like will children and youth might use the product that is in development right now, what threats might that cause. The usage of children and youth is different from those of adults? And what threats will that cause? So putting these questions ahead of a release, you could design your products and services accordingly.
And you might ask why safety by design? Well, these are just some reasons that have been gathered putting protection of minors as early as possible in the development process, you will have a cheaper development. Putting it beforehand is much better than putting it in later on. You will have a robust code, and you will have a higher quality of product. You can have new business models, you will have reduction of liability risks, you will have higher visibility. You all know this, and you might push forward the standardization of interfaces and improve convergence.
The question what I like to talk with you about is might we, thinking of this principle, might we have a higher effectiveness of child protection? And Sabine Frank of Google will talk about an example.
>> SABINE FRANK: Very good to be with you today. Just a few examples. This is a Chrome, examples we have within Chrome, 750 million users worldwide. So one thought which I think we all could have is if we know that we have several platforms which we use, devices that we use, what could be a good tool to actually have on line safety for family members. And this is not only about children, but if we look at how many elderly people are new to the internet and use tablets as well and use simple devices as well.
So I think this is a whole set of questions we have here. So our first answer is Chrome supervised users, so this is cross platform idea. You can preselect, you can open up an account for the supervised users. You don’t have to have a Google account with us, so it’s a manager who is actually managing the supervised user. You can create little items and bubbles for them.
You have to press, and this is really important, you have to press the supervised user box under the number 3 where you certainly say who is managing the supervised user. And then if you go, then you come to the dashboard. And within the dashboard, you can manage that supervised user. In this case it’s Mia. It could be someone else. It could be as I said also your parents, not only your kids.
And what you do here as besides that, we have safe search, and You Tube safety opted in so it’s automatically in there. You can decide whether you want to create a black list or white list. We have heard from John and Elizabeth that kids usually have only a small set of websites they aim for. So this could be a very good starting point for them and where they actually go out and go about.
One other thing that is, I think, important, and is not really in the mind set of a lot of people is that we need to engage kids and parents more into a dialogue. So we have parents who don’t really understand what the kids are doing on line, and what they wish to, what they wish to see, what websites they are interested in. So after creating black lists or white lists which you may do, your kid can only also say, well, I would actually like to see a website which you have not white listed. And they request permission.
So this permission request goes then into the email account of you as parents, for example. And then you can allow or deny this. So you have a way to actually interact very automatically. And I think this allows parents and kids meaningful discussion of what are they allowed to see on line and parents have a better idea what they are interested in. So the content of safety by design, it’s not only about safety insight, but also about meaningful conversation that we need to aim for.
And this is one thing we have introduced awhile ago. This is early stage, but I hope this is something that goes in the right direction. And we as a company will be very eager to hear your feedback and see how it goes.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you, Sabine and Tilman, for that short introduction of approach to safety by design. We now turn to the youth, to Lennart and Luca, and I think you both seem not to be a supervised user, but maybe a supervisor to other users when you – I would like to hear afterward what you think about that system. But first of all, we agreed that we will do now a short interview with you about your own experiences and maybe you could tell us at first what are the most popular sites, services and apps that you and your young peers are using today and do you see any risks in using that for yourself but also for younger people? Do you have a microphone?
>> LENNART NICKAL: At first, I think the most particular sites are Facebook, Twitter, maybe shopping, internet pages for shopping like Amazon or Wanelo. And I think for young people these websites are very important, and they get more and more fixed part in the daily life of us and young people. And I would say there are a few other very popular things like apps. You all know of the app Candy Crush.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Can you explain?
>> LENNART NICKAL: It’s a game connected with Facebook, and you need to – it’s like a puzzle, and, yes, it has some risks for young people. You will explain them. And there are other things like services for young people so they don’t need, in the internet so they don’t need to go out of the house. They are interacting – yes, that’s the music of candy crush. You see it. He uses it.
Yes, and the risks, we will explain.
>> LUCA TRONCONE: Thank you. First, and I think one of the biggest problems of these apps services and sites is the time wasting. You have to invest a lot of time in such apps or sites, and I think the people often don’t know how much time to spend in front of the windows of their computer or cell phone.
>> JUTTA CROLL: So you would say like a time control or monitoring of the time you have spent would be useful for you?
>> LUCA TRONCONE: Yes, until I special age. I think 16 or 17 you know you have to learn how much time you should spend with such sites and services and it’s important that you get to know this by you’re own.
>> JUTTA CROLL: So it needs a little bit of training to manage how much time you spend. Okay. Then I don’t know how it was in your family, but what I learned from many talks to parents is that they are looking for technical support. They feel a little bit confused about everything, and so they get the feeling if I have some technical tool on the computer, I can at least have some safety for my children.
Some of these tools only, like it was described before, act like a filter that prevent children from coming across some inappropriate content, but which could be pornography but also racist content or something like that, but on the other hand, there are more and more tools that monitor what children are doing that can give the parents complete control to see what children have been doing, and it goes so far that on mobile devices we have GPRS tracking where parents can check where their children are at the moment.
What do you think about those tools and have you ever discussed with your parents? Have they made an attempt to control you in that way?
>> LENNART NICKAL: I will come to the first part of the question. The technical tools for safety and searching for the internet, I think it’s very important that young people are getting controlled by their parents a bit, so they don’t get in contact with these adult contents because they can have a negative effect on the development and the education of these children.
But I think it should always be limited because when you grow up, you need to be able to find these sites that are critical. You need to get in contact with them so you know the dangers and the risks, so you know what is forbidden and what is not. Because when you then are 18, when you are 18 and there is no more control from your parents, so you are, you never got in contact with these critical sites, you don’t know how to deal with them. And you don’t know anything about the problems.
So I think that it should be limited for the age the people are at the moment. And –
>> JUTTA CROLL: Anything to add?
>> The role in this clash between protection of the children and liberty of the children is the parents should give safety framework so the people can educate them in a safety way.
>> JUTTA CROLL: In the session before this workshop here in the room, it was discussed about freedom of expression, and the whole discussion went one hour, and never was mentioned that freedom of expression is also a fundamental right to children. It’s not only that when you are 18, then up have the right to information, and the right to freedom of expression, as well as privacy is a right that you have from birth.
So have you ever had a discussion about that with your parents, for example, or with your teachers? Is it a topic that – do children and young people know that they have these rights? And you have called it a clash between the interest of the parents and the child, but do you think that most of the young people are aware of that situation?
>> LENNART NICKAL: Yes, I think most of the children know where the problems are because in our age, I’m talking about our age. But in the young generations, you are now growing as we are now about 6, 7 years old who are maybe on the same technical level as we are now at the moment because they start using a tablet or a Smart Phone in such young ages. So we need to have a look on the special, maybe also on the correct of the special children because the relationship between the parents and the children is always the most important part in the development and the using of the internet.
The privacy on this side as maybe other children know about their privacy and their rights, and I have the opinion that parents shouldn’t look in eMails or read letters because they don’t – we do that too, and but they should control in which – they should create a framework on which sites and on what networks the children can communicate with each other, and I think that’s the most important part.
And you should have a discussion between the children and the parents maybe at the table while eating something. It should be an issue in the daily life.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you very much for that perspective from your age. So we planned to do now the word cafe and we will discuss these four topics, the positive content, the parental control by technical means, safety by design and empowerment of children and youth at the four corners of the table, but before you go to the tables and you are free to discuss all of the four topics, move around the table or if you decide only to discuss with John, with Luca and Lennar or Elizabeth or Sabine and Tilman, it’s up to you, but before we start that I would like to ask whether we have some comments from remote participants? No comment, okay.
Anything in the room that should be said right now to the plenary before we go in the smaller group discussions? Okay. Jiannis?
>> JIANNIS KOUDOUNAS: Picking up on something that Narine said earlier and I would like to hear the view of young people it’s something called packaging of information, and Narine pointed out that nowadays we are only getting the information that suits our point of view, and this can lead to stereotyping. We are not getting the full picture as we used to do, for example, with newspapers.
Other problem with this is that it’s got to be spectacular all of the time. So we are not really getting information, but just what we are looking for and what can catch our attention. I’d like to know or hear a little about the young people’s point of view of this because I think sometimes it’s too easy to look at the easy problems, stop seeing things that are not meant for young children, but we are not really looking at the deeper issues.
So what do young people think about this? Because I think it can also guide the way we work in our groups. Thank you.
>> LENNART NICKAL: Could you please summarize your question one more time?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you think about the fact that you are getting fed information that suits the searchers that you have been doing, that suits the ideas that you have been putting out? So what do you think about information being shaped for you whereas you think that you are free with your information?
>> JUTTA CROLL: It’s a difficult question, I would say. And if I may add, Janice said as it was more free information with the newspaper, yes, that’s right, but only if you choose to read three or four newspapers a day, because if you choose only one, and we have one very big newspaper in Germany, the small word in the title, then you only get one opinion than of the broad variety. So I would not sigh that it’s completely different with newspapers than now with the internet, but what I think the question is do you feel comfortable with that situation? Do you see that you get sometimes a preselected, preselection of information?
>> I think it is slightly broader than that, and I agree it’s an extremely important one. Even if you read that horrible German newspaper whose name you wouldn’t mention, the fact is you will, if you just turn the pages, you are going to see a story about crime, you are going to see a story about football, English football, of course, because that’s the most important football. You are going to see a story about foreign affairs, but if you have set up news feeds or if you have set up your time lines or whatever it might be, you are going to get stories always on the same topics.
And it’s not true that you don’t have, therefore, the same sort of liberty. Serendipity, one of the great things about going into a library with actual books, for example, or the same with the newspaper is you can trip over things. You are more likely to, but if you are just getting feeds about the same stuff all of the time, you are only talking to the same – you are in a group that’s only interested in one thing or another, we call it ghettoization, you end up in silos and at the time chance of getting out is reduced.
>> LENNART NICKAL: I would say in every newspaper you will find a political way how it is described, and so there is also selection in the newspapers, and you shouldn’t just read one newspaper every morning. You should read a few Articles about the same theme, and that’s the same in the internet. You can choose between so many Articles and information platforms that you can complete your, maybe your (Internet difficulties). I think we know how to get on with this information.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you. One comment from Sabine and then you and then we try to discuss like world cafe.
>> SABINE FRANK: I would like to echo what has been said, the ability to get multiple information is much, much higher than before the digital age, I mean, who did read ten newspapers just like a few people did so you do have the possibilities to go across platforms and search different Articles. You have also the possibility to search like using being lucky searches, et cetera, you are not bound to just stay in the social network and get your stream, but do more. So I think it’s about you being an active user and you seeking for information, but once you have that mindset that you want to do this, your ability to get more information is much higher.
But I do see that discussion also in the context of positive content, because if we speak about creating lists for children, then I think this idea of we need to make sure that we have actually a broad variety of different views, different content is very important to keep in mind, but this is an absolutely different discussion than the general discussion which we usually have about like small version of the net you only get.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: There is one question I wanted to ask about the four groups you introduced, because after all, we are here at the dialogue on internet governance and to me governance means what the state, what the government can do to influence the internet, so in this case is means how to assist children not to be abused on the internet. That’s what I think the government should do. Now, we have had this discussion in Germany a few years ago, the question of blocking websites.
And it was just voted down by some people who didn’t want blocking of websites, which I think was a very bad thing for protection of children, but that’s the way things are at the moment in this country. So I was just wondering if this is also a topic for this room, because if we are talking about internet by design or safety by design, what I have heard is examples like Chrome browser being adopted which is just a personal thing, or you have parents watching their children, which is good, I think, but that’s not really design. That’s just depends on the parent, and if the parent is not able or doesn’t know about the internet, he can’t do that.
And then we have fragFINN. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a group of young children how to use the internet. I did this for a couple of years with different groups of children, and I think the first lesson we started with fragFINN, and all of them had heard about fragFINN, of course, but then it took five minutes and they said now we want to talk about the real internet and not about the baby internet which is fragFINN.
So I think we, if we talk about design of the internet, we shouldn’t really talk about, you know, small corners where well meaning people want to force children into because I think children want the real internet. They want to do what their parents do. So I think it’s misleading to say we are creating small islands for children, and we expect them to stay there. That’s not going to work.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you so much for your comment. I would like to regard your first question refer to the title of the workshop, which is intelligent risk management and this comes from several years ago, it was 2007 when the Hans Plato institute evaluated the German system of use protection, and they came out with that that we need intelligent risk management. We have several risks in various areas and we need an intelligent system that we can build on, and that was the reason why we decided to talk about these four pillars we see that can build up that intelligent system of risk management.
And I think we could go now into the four groups. We have the task to phrase some messages from Berlin that shall go from the EuroDIG so the Internet Governance Forum which will be held in the first week of September in Istanbul this year and it would be useful if we could phrase this of these messages. How can the concept of safety by design, it’s not safety, it’s not design of the internet, it’s safety that is thought from the beginning.
So if you think you have a good input to that, you should come to this corner of the table and just discuss with the people who have some expertise for the concept of safety by design. But also for the positive content, I think that could be said a lot of things about what do we force children into small corners? I wouldn’t say 11,000 URLs a small corner for children and I would expect that younger children would not see that it’s the baby internet. It’s more than that, but that all could be discussed around the table and those Chairs on the walls, they are not fixed. You can move up to the corners of the table, just do that.
And we can only save now, I think, five minutes at the end of the session where we can bring these four messages that you can work out at the table then to the whole plenary. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would like to get back to personalization and why we think this is important. So just one example, when a person is looking for pornography on line, search engines tend to present you with what you are looking for more and more. They are not just random results. If you look different people when they search for the same key words, they receive different results based on their previous web history.
And what is more even important that sometimes off line data can be incorporated as well, so I think this is important if we are looking ahead, if we are discussing the safety of children, we should keep this in mind.
>> (Off microphone).
>> JUTTA CROLL: We have only ten minutes left, so would you please phrase your message for your topic that you have been working on? Only one message that you can report back to the plenary, and that we can take for the report of this workshop. Within the next five minutes, please.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Okay. Then we summarize. John, would you tell us your message, so your group is solved. I’m really disappointed. We have one message regards positive content. It’s up to you.
>> JOHN CARR: One message – we are two.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Okay.
>> JOHN CARR: Our two messages were, first of all, the conventional business models in the online space do not seem to be producing sufficient positive content for children and young people. Therefore, do we need to look at alternative ways of achieving that end, which everybody agrees is highly desirable. For example, like they have in Germany, public subsidy for producers of positive content for children.
The second point that we wanted to make was that we need to remember there are two aspects to the on line world, one children as consumers of content that’s on the internet, and the other is children and young people as producers of positive content, and we need to give both of those things some attention, not just consuming, but producing.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you very much. So what about the parental control tools?
>> We have talked about a few different strategies we could recommend, starting with ISP’s offering filtering tools like it’s been implemented in the U.K. now, including the choice of offering parents monitoring software if they wish to get a printout of – but come to the privacy aspect of the minutes of that. The second strategy, if I may, was education, educating parents on how to use so on so forth which you all know about very well, but we also talked about educating children, children not just to keep safe on the internet, but also in a broader sense so that they become smarter kids. Rather than deal with a fact of life which is inappropriate content on the internet which is not going to go away for sure.
And we also had a little comment on the privacy debate we had earlier talking about children, yes, children who have a Human Rights to privacy, but there is also a wider stronger right which is the right, how would we phrase it, the best interest of the child to insure that children get a safe and secure upbringing, the best possible opportunities for healthy upbringing both mentally and physically.
So those considerations could sometimes override the right to privacy, so those are the three things we wanted to say.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you very much. I’m tempted to hand over to the young boys because they also talked about education for parents, but shall we continue with you?
>> For us, our message is that parents should more get educated in the technical things and the possibilities so that they can educate their children on their own, and parents should set restrictions, but they always need to know that some time for the children without limits is good, that they can realize their own limits so that they know how far they can go and realize their own borders where they say that’s not good for me or that was too much time spent in front of the PC.
>> JUTTA CROLL: What about safety by design?
>> We have two recommendations, one is to develop guidelines in the respective industry standard organisations for safety impact assessment. For when the product or the service is mainly used by minors, and this can be done so to speak, in accordance with – or not in accordance, analog to something that is already done in the industry and that is, for example, the privacy assessment. So depending on the product, depending on the service, it could be different industry organisations that develop it, but it would be helpful if one would have to have guidelines on what should be safety impact assessments.
>> The other one goes to awareness campaigns. We feel that only safety will not help in the end, but echoing what you said if parents don’t understand the full picture, then it probably will not help, so we also ask for a guideline for awareness campaigns because we see that a lot of, there are a lot of awareness campaigns out, but giving too many different messages. So I think it would be very helpful to streamline a bit in the messaging and then have these campaigns ideally in a public private partnership to gain from everybody as everybody’s assets.
>> JUTTA CROLL: Thank you so much to all of you for participating in that workshop, and for helping us phrasing these messages from Berlin. I hope that we will be able to bring in, we were asked just come in and have three valid points. Regina will help us as our reporter to have all of these messages that you have been doing and to bring that back into the plenary. I think this will happen in the afternoon. So thank you very much and have a good way home. Bye-bye.
(Applause)
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