PassW0rd – 11th September 2019 (Pity the Children)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello, I’m Peter Warren and this is Password on Resonance FM. This week, my dog Sid celebrated his birthday. On the internet, nobody knows he’s a dog and nobody knows how old he is. Age verification doesn’t matter much for Sid since he hardly spends any time online, and it’s my daughter who updates his Facebook and Instagram pages. But age verification is a huge issue for children because the large search, social media, and games companies are deliberately targeting them. Something we found out this month when a $170 million fine was levied against Google and its subsidiary YouTube to settle allegations YouTube had collected personal information from children without obtaining parental consent, violating the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Being able to access only age-appropriate content online is now being seen as a crucial part of the next stage in our developing relationship with tech. It’s one of the most difficult problems facing the politicians who are working on the UK government’s new draft law on online harms. International lawmakers are watching to see whether Britain really will be able to legislate the big American technology companies into compliance. There are signs that the battle is already hotting up. In the US, Microsoft President Brad Smith has warned in his forthcoming book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, that governments can outgun corporate titans. The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Smith reveals, learned that life actually does require compromise and governments actually are stronger than companies. When they want to, governments can declare war. So it’s no wonder in this age of fake news, sexting, and cyberbullying that parents everywhere are waiting and hoping for guidance, laws, or technical fixes to protect their children. Many would welcome a ban on smartphones in schools like the one that’s been introduced in the Australian state of Victoria. In the UK, research for the organization responsible for running the country’s domain names, Nominet, found that 6 in 10 of the UK’s young people between 11 and 24 who were asked said they thought phones should be banned from schools. But Jake Moore of mobile phone company ESET tells me that’s the opposite of what children really need.

Speaker C: Well, I think smartphones have become such a way of life, they’re here to stay, they’re not going anywhere. And so I think we need to get smarter about the role they play in our lives. And so, like I say, they could be such a fantastic, valuable resource that can be used in the classroom We need to get much more innovative with that. So for example, a teacher could say, right, everyone go to your lockers and get your phones out. And we’re going to look at the latest app that you’ve downloaded. Let’s look at those T&Cs that come with that app. And some of those apps will be asking for your physical location at all times, even when the app’s not turned on. Maybe they’re looking to look at all your photos in your photo album. So these are the kind of security aspects that I’m trying to get across to people that they might not be aware that they’re offering out when they go and download these apps.

Speaker B: That’s a very good idea, isn’t it? Because essentially, what you can do is you could do almost a location-based game outside, get the kids to run around because everybody’s complaining that they’re sitting on their sofas too much, and sort of use it, come up with some apps that show people how you can find out where they are and what they’re doing, and turn it into a sort of a surveillance game that brings it home to them.

Speaker C: Yeah, there are apps out there that definitely get, get those kids up and about and playing around and geocaching and all these types of fun games. But as long as we understand the risks that go with that, and so we want to make sure that we’re not giving away our location when we’re not using the app and making sure that we understand all those risks associated with them.

Speaker B: Using smartphones in school to learn about cybersecurity could be one way of protecting children, but their devices are central to their social lives too, for better or for for worse. Elena Samuelsson works in schools in Sweden and presented her project at the Copenhagen Tech Festival, a conference a couple of days ago that was aiming to put humans first in technology. She helps groups of teenagers talk openly about their online habits and worries, such as bullying and self-harm.

Speaker D: In Sweden right now, we’re seeing that 80% of, like, children that call, uh, police which is this Swedish organization for ensuring children’s rights in society. They’re 14-year-old girls. We’re seeing another group of people who are more prone to developing mental disorders are people from lower socioeconomic classes, people who might have been migrating here, who come with post-traumatic stress disorder. And it’s like, so we have certain groups that we know, but we were— right now we’re a bit careful and not trying to segregate people based on that data, but rather just focusing on where everyone is right now and trying to, through like knowledge and exercises, bring them higher up on their journey.

Speaker B: You’re saying that soon you’ll be spending more on mental health than you will on physical health. Is it technologically related? Is there more loneliness because people are using more screens and they’re not going out and talking to people? You said earlier on the panel discussion, you said that people weren’t taking as much physical exercise as they used to, which is evidently something that’s to do with technology.

Speaker D: I don’t know if I dare to say that it’s so strongly correlated to, like, technology. I also think It might be when you’re a child, your, your mother asks you to go play soccer. So you do that. But then when you become like a teenager, you all of a sudden get to make your own choices and maybe you get different interests. And I think that could also be a reason why people stop exercising. You’re seeing a lot of girls who stop exercising, which is also interesting. And we don’t fully know why. And I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out. What we are seeing is that we see the teenagers socializing with technology and with each other. So the boys that we speak to, a lot of them are playing games on Fortnite, and that’s where they’re socialized. So they’re each sitting in their homes chatting and talking while they’re playing video games. And I think that’s definitely like a new like phenomenon. If you look at the younger children right now, there are some scientists are actually a bit worried about their brain’s development because your brain develops with sense of touch and with being seen and held by your parents. And now there’s a bigger trend of giving the kids an iPad rather than hugging them when they’re crying. And so that, I think, we don’t know yet what the implications are going to be, but I do I think we’re gonna see differences in how we learn. A lot of technology today, especially if you look at the social networks where kids and also adults spend a lot of time, they’re specifically designed to trigger dopamine levels in your brains. They’re designed to keep you on the platform. Like, the infinite scroll is designed to keep you there. And we, with our primal brains, like, we, we haven’t dealt with this before. So I personally find it interesting to look into technology that has mental health or people’s well-being as a, like, ground design, like, metric to be very interesting, where you’re actually designing something to be good for the person, like, using it.

Speaker B: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because you say 50% of mental disorders start at the age of 14. That’s also the sort of time that people are beginning to get involved with social media now, isn’t it? That’s one of the points when you’re beginning to accelerate perhaps some of these stresses and some of these issues that people have where they think maybe they’re lonely or whatever. Is that something that you’re researching?

Speaker D: Yeah, and it’s It’s funny you say it because, and I don’t remember the exact number, but they’ve seen that if you get a Facebook account before the age of 12 or 13, you’re much higher likely to develop like a mental health disorder than what you are if you wait until you’re maybe 15, 16, which is just like, like a few years. But I think it has something to do with you’re so like malleable at that age and your brain is actually changing from like a children’s brain to more of a teenager brain, and what we consume and what we do, it definitely impacts us.

Speaker B: In the UK, they’re thinking of introducing a digital identity which will show how old you are and say, hey, no, you can’t use Facebook, you can’t use this, you’re not old enough. Do you think that that’s something that’s good? Do you think that’s a solution? Do you think that’s something that The technology companies should certainly be able to enforce that because they seem to know everything about us. They must know how old we are.

Speaker D: I definitely think it’s good to try to create a framework around how we use technology. I think parents today might be struggling a bit of how to set that framework for their children because they did not grow up with these kind of rules because you didn’t have an iPhone like when I was younger.

Speaker B: That’s the view from Sweden, and Elena Samuelsson confided in me that she limits her own screen time and finds a sense of community through her Buddhist faith, Kakao ceremonies, and yoga rather than in social networks. So we’ve heard from Jake Moore and Elena Samuelsson about some of the pros and cons of smartphones for children, but what do children themselves think? Dr. Aengsar Kurnes carried out his own research into the issues by talking to hundreds of children and young people for a major study at the University of Nottingham. He described the key findings to Password’s Jane Wyatt at the Byline Festival of Independent Journalism. Perhaps surprisingly, the children didn’t want to encounter online content that was made for older teenagers or adults.

Speaker E: It’s not that they feel they want to get something which is being blocked. It’s more that they’re bumping into things that they wish they weren’t seeing. YouTube, which does the, you know, you’ve watched one thing, it starts recommending a next thing, and it starts drifting off away from what you actually wanted to see towards the things that perhaps are more profitable for YouTube. Because they are monetized kinds of content. I mean, most famously, you have the algorithmically generated content, which is just picking keywords, mashing them together, generating a new video, which is sort of pulling out stuff from existing popular ones and making very bad quality new things. And there’s just a waste of time, but it’s also just Sometimes it’s— there’s for some reason terrible content in there. Adult content, but yeah, it’s more violent content or just disgusting kind of content.

Speaker F: And how do the young people react when they come across those things?

Speaker E: Well, sometimes they’re quite distressed about it. What they’re very concerned about is that there’s nobody really that they can go to to get proper answers for it because their parents don’t understand how these how these things work, why they’re getting these kinds of things, or what they should be doing. Their teachers don’t either. If they go to school and they ask about it, the digital natives concept is true to the one extent that the children are frequently the ones that actually know more about it than the teachers do. And that’s a problem. So that’s one of the reasons why we also started thinking in terms of an educational tool to help. And really going along with our existing philosophy of it should be coming from the children. It’s not an educational tool in the sense of here’s another app that’s going to just tell you things, but really it’s more sort of an interactive thing that you do with the group. And that’s sort of— it’s based on cards, and the cards will produce, will give you some key information that you can then build on.

Speaker F: So these are physical cards?

Speaker E: Yes, it’s physical cards, and there will be some exercises that you can do with it and some instruction kinds of cards like be the algorithm. Start thinking about if you were to be a— if you wanted to be an algorithm that’s going to maximize the profit for your company and try by targeting sort of content that people would want most, what kind of information would you need in order to be able to do that? How would you choose what to optimize for? So which choices to kind of make? And then there are additional cards that will give you information about the types of data that can be collected online. You know, the location data, the login data, the frequency with which a certain IP address is going in, et cetera, those kinds of things. And other cards that will tell you things like what kind of rights do you actually have. Because there are various existing rights around non-discrimination, around copyright, around various rights that exist, and many people aren’t really aware of that. And so then, you know, as you’re going through that exercise, you say, well, okay, we’re trying to make profit with this kind of thing, and we’re going to try— well, we want to have this kind of data, but wait a minute, there’s privacy rights that exist. So with those, what would we need to do? And then start thinking about the whole process of how— why is it that the online world is the way that it is when you’re interacting with it. And for instance, on the privacy one, why is it that you are always being asked to tick this box about giving consent, and the explanatory text that goes with it is so long and has so many things in it that you can’t understand?

Speaker F: Not only children feel that way.

Speaker E: Yes, not only children feel that way, but, but it— and, but this is one of the things that turns conditions thing. They’ve all— it’s been in every session that we had, has been one of the things that came up that they say, and we want this to be more easy for us to access. We want it to be presented in a different style, not as a big lump of legal kind of text. We want it in an engaging way, perhaps with videos. And we want there perhaps to be a channel where we can ask questions. So it’s not just a static text but more of a dynamic kind of thing where you can say, “But wait a minute, I don’t understand this bit, please explain it to me.” And so some of that work has fed into a report that we did together with a charity called Five Rights who’ve been campaigning for the rights of young people. So together with them we developed a report on the internet in the children’s voice, which was presented to the House of Lords and fed into one of the inquiries that they were running. And gradually this has built towards, in 2018, that the Data Protection Act 2018 that was passed has a clause included in it around age-appropriate design. And so this really goes beyond even what’s in the GDPR It’s taken in the GDPR, the data protection law from the EU. There is a clause around recognizing children as being a vulnerable group. But first of all, that doesn’t actually define what up to what age is children. And second of all, it doesn’t go into the details of it. So the age-appropriate design clause specifies first of all that Child is anybody up to 18, because that is the age where, according to the UN Charter of the Rights of Children, you are a child. So it’s not 13, like what a lot of the US companies like to pursue, but it is actually 18. And secondly, it specifies clear limitations on what kind of data can be collected from children and how that data can be used. And the Information Commissioner’s Office of the, the UK’s Data Protection Authority has been tasked to translate this part of the data protection law into a specific code of how to implement.

Speaker B: Asghar Khan, further evidence of what young people themselves think about their online options comes from that new survey we mentioned earlier by Nominet. The company that administers domain names in the UK.

Speaker A: Nominet, the UK agency for domain names, has been talking to young people about what they do online. They asked 11 to 17-year-olds about what they can do and got impressive results.

Speaker F: 88% can connect to Wi-Fi, compared to 84% of adults. 80% can upload a video clip, but only 66% of adults can do that. 83% can change the settings on a mobile phone, compared to 76% of grown-ups. 64% can use a sat nav to find their way to a new destination, 75% of adults say they can. 10% can build a website from scratch, compared to only 7% of over-25-year-olds. When they asked the young people about their concerns, they found that 19% have been bullied through social media. 69% know someone who has been bullied through social media. 36% feel under pressure to impress online friends and followers. 10% have been critical of somebody that they don’t know online. And 8% have suffered anxiety or other mental health issues as a result of social media posts.

Speaker A: And when it comes to privacy and security, 53% worry that people will steal their personal information if they share too much online, whilst 44% think that the government is watching everything they do online.

Speaker B: Asger Raskin from the Centre for Humane Technology and the former head of user experience for the search company Mozilla sees things from the other side of the small screen. As a software developer who knows how web companies target young people.

Speaker G: We’re supposed to not go after, like, kids younger than 13, but, you know, they— I was just reading about a set of games for children where when the in-app purchase dialogue comes up and you click no, your avatar in the game starts to cry, which is very clear emotional manipulation. And that’s of course one example of many. If you can get children hooked, you’ll have them all the way. So YouTube for kids is a great example of a product where it used to be, you know, the Saturday morning breakfast cartoons, like there are rules and regulations about what kinds of ads and what kind of content can be shown. Those don’t exist. For online content.

Speaker B: So what’s the impact of that on children, right?

Speaker G: When your world is smaller, right? If you think back to what it’s like to be in high school or middle school, your world is your social sphere. That’s, that’s it. And if I can get you— instead of just trying to get your attention, if I can get you addicted to needing attention, that’s way more efficient. So one way of doing that is if I could undermine your sense of self-esteem, that would, that would get you addicted to needing attention. How am I to do that? Well, how about if I showed you proof every single day that your friends liked you more if you look different than you actually do, right? Because that’s Snapchat and Instagram. And in 2017, 55% of plastic surgeons in the US reported having seen patients that came in looking, asking to look like their filters. So it’s like climbing down deep into the value system of our kids and changing what they want fundamentally. And then, you know, our brains are still developing. Our technology is training us away from having delayed gratification. ’cause you just have whatever you want right now. And how that’s going to affect the generation, we don’t know yet. But there’s no control. This is a psychological experiment we’re running on the entire world.

Speaker B: We interviewed a while back some people from the computer gaming industry, and we said, Fortnite, games like this, they’re all terribly addictive. And they said, well, you make TV, are you not going to make it compulsive? Do you not want people to watch it? Are you going to make bad TV? Why are you asking us to make bad computer games? Is that a valid point?

Speaker G: I don’t think it’s, you know, behind a television screen, there isn’t the difference once again. Is how specific you’re asking. Like, you’re talking to the Fortnite people and they’re like, yeah, but television. That’s true too, but video games put you in contact— like, you and your friends play at the same time. And they—

Speaker F: they’re—

Speaker G: Fortnite actually uses really interesting, clever tricks to make sure that it gets an entire group of people. And one person leaves, they’re sort of letting down your friends. Do you pulls you back in, there are, you know, they have hundreds of engineers that are thinking about the ways in which to make these games the most addictive that they can. And it’s just fundamentally not fair, right? Like when you used to sit down as a child thinking you’re just playing this game, but really there’s this group of people sitting on the other end A/B testing and designing this thing to grab your attention and to keep you stuck. And that’s, you know, that’s a big difference too, is like television doesn’t have the same amount of hardcore data and A/B testing that goes into targeting your mind particularly.

Speaker B: You were saying algorithms are actually identifying people that take Alex Jones, for example, that Google was pumping him really high up in the ratings. If you’re talking about algorithmic interference, isn’t that a dangerous thing? Because that’s the sort of thing that the Chinese government have already been accused of doing in terms of wanting to socialize their own population. If you start down that road, that could be quite a difficult one to travel.

Speaker G: So how are we not already doing algorithmic interference now? I don’t understand that term interference here because that says somehow the thing we’re doing now is magical and okay. It’s not. We see the direction it’s pushing us. So the question is not like the car is already moving and we, we don’t get to decide whether we— it’s to start it moving. It’s already going.

Speaker B: Okay. Now, another point. Google used to have a very famous slogan. See no evil, hear no evil.

Speaker G: Don’t be evil. Yeah.

Speaker B: Isn’t that again— I mean, that’s the hippie to the corporate. I mean, look at Niklas Zennström. There he was, he was one of the people behind one of the early file-sharing systems. Now he’s this big corporate man who’s flogged Skype twice. Isn’t that— that’s the point, isn’t it? Because you have these conflicting things that are going on in technology where you have the predators and you have the food. Essentially what happens is, you’ve used the word metrics, it’s almost Dickensian, people are seen as numbers, they’re seen as hands like in Hard Times, and people don’t care about them as people, they just want them as numbers. I mean, that seems to me to be the issue.

Speaker G: Yeah, that’s a big core part of it, is that when you reach scale, people just become numbers. And you’re not in contact with the effects of what you build, right? If Facebook engineers had to go spend time in Myanmar to see the effects of what giving free internet to a population with high racial tension caused, I think you would start to see products being designed very differently.

Speaker B: I personally think that the ramifications of technology addiction, the ramifications to the way that people have been using technology, will be seen in about 5 years’ time, and then you’re going to start seeing them go up on a curve like that because you’re going to see lots and lots of people with personality disorders. Is this something that you’re concerned about?

Speaker G: Oh yeah, we saw 2013 to 2017, high depressive symptoms and suicide and suicidal thoughts in women went from sort of a constant around 17%, 19% and jumped almost 30% right at the outset of when social media and our phones really, really took off. We’re going to see that, of course, increase. Loneliness in the US is already like one of the top mental health issues. And there was a paper from Microsoft last year where their social chatbot has been given sort of what they call empathic abilities. So they’re optimizing for long-term use and whether the user feels like an emotional satisfying. What does that mean? It’s already like it works. Like you read the transcripts, they’re chilling because after a couple of weeks Many of their users are turning to the chatbot as their primary source, the AI as their primary source of communication.

Speaker B: So we’re seeing technology trying to come up with the solution for the problems it’s caused.

Speaker G: Well, and what I’m saying here is that loneliness is about to become one of our largest national security threats.

Speaker B: So, avatars that cry when they don’t get their own way, body shaming by pretend friends, real online friends who won’t let you leave the game. All this might make online products addictive, or threatening, or both. The white paper on online harms aims to regulate these problems, and even before this new law can find a parliament where it can be debated, the British government is introducing new compulsory health education for schools. It was introduced by the then Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, who left the UK government in July following the appointment of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. He said, growing up and adolescence are hard enough, but the internet and social media add new pressures that just weren’t there even one generation ago. So many things about the way people interact have changed, and this new world, seamless between online and offline, can be difficult to navigate. Almost 20 years on from the last time guidance on sex education was updated, there’s a lot to catch up on. But this new attitude of schools towards children’s online data comes too late, according to Jen Pearson. She’s the founder of the pressure group Defend Digital Me and campaigns for transparency about how the schools themselves use pupils’ data and give it to tech companies.

Speaker F: Schools have a statutory obligation to protect children from using content in the course of their education which is considered harmful, and the schools to some extent can control control what is considered harmful, but in fact most of the time it’s really decided by companies because they use— schools use software in order to monitor what is harmful online, and they do so by buying in software from companies. There’s about 15 providers in the UK who do so, and it monitors everything that a child accesses searches or types on screen on a computer, either on the school’s own device, or it may also, depending on the company and the school policy, be monitoring the child’s own personal device like an iPad or their mobile phone. And the safeguarding in schools software monitors for a list of possible harms, and the company’s to decide what those are, together with input from Internet Watch Foundation and Counter Terrorism Unit, because some of what is monitored for in schools is run under the auspices of the PREVENT programme, so part of a Home Office programme that puts an obligation on schools to monitor and protect children from radicalisation and extremism. But there’s a real conflict of interest really here, because some of what is considered harmful is very subjective, and the online harms do not necessarily all have a clear definition. So for example, while schools may be monitoring children for the content of websites which are clearly being blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation and are considered radicalisation or terrorist content. Other things that could be picked up by the system may not be, but can be mixed in. So we’ve had examples of a teacher whose young boy was flagged as being a potential gang member because he had looked up the words ‘black rhinos’ on his screen. And it was felt that obviously the system had decided that these words in connection with what they were looking for had potential gang member connotations. The trouble is the schools are risk-averse because they’re under great pressure to be seen to always be doing the right thing correctly by children and also want to, quite rightly, fulfil their obligations to children in school. But again, what’s happened is that the software can enable children not only to be monitored in school but also out of hours, because if they are logged into their systems, it might be monitoring their use whilst they’re logged into the school system but at home, or it might be monitoring the children logged into the school system using their mobile phone or mobile device which they’ve taken home, or the school’s laptop which their child is borrowing and has taken home, or is using, for example, this is our holidays, one of the companies companies, biggest companies, uh, UK-wide delivering this software spoke to a House of Lords parliamentary committee in 2016 and said that some of their greatest activity is in the summer holidays. So they know that they’re monitoring outside of school hours, but the question is, do parents and do children? And there’s no transparency at all around the profiles that then creates about a child, of what search terms have they looked for, what inferred information does that then create. Does it, for example, look at a child who has made an internet search for cliffs and flag them as a potential suicide risk, as it did for one child that we were contacted about? And where is this information going and who might use it in future? When schools are risk-averse, they don’t want to to delete that kind of information because they feel that should a child ever actually be at risk of self-harm, they could be accused, the school, of not having taken action and having deleted evidence that there was a risk. Which of course is absurd when the teacher says, ‘That child was looking up cliffs because we were doing a geology lesson and it shouldn’t have happened.’ It’s a complete mistake, but there’s no information information from these companies of how many genuine mistakes are there versus the system just flagged something that was then considered not important.

Speaker H: So is it algorithms that are deciding what these trigger words are going to be?

Speaker F: It’s a really good question. There’s so little information in the public domain. We’ve gone to some of the companies and asked them. 2 out of the 15 providers in the UK have been very open and willing to chat, the others not. But the decision-making processes can be very different from software to software and also from school to school.

Speaker B: Parents like Mary Rahman are typically concerned because with children aged from 4 months to almost 11, each of her children has very different needs for online protection and explanation. There’s also some tension with their father, who as a technologist himself believes that iPads and smartphones are educational. Mary Rahman told Jane she even feels guilty about spending time on her own social network and using the iPad as a babysitter.

Speaker H: Everyone is super speedy now with technology. The world has become really smaller. There’s great benefits to that, and there’s other ways that I just simply cannot keep up. So I’ll check posts, I love Twitter, but in a way sometimes when I reprimand my children, I do sometimes think, oh gosh, well, you know, here I am using it. I just want everyone to use the technology valuably, have it for some entertainment, but also have that balance of using it for positive communication, like the learning, certain things, news articles or news headlines. I don’t need to put on my TV and look for channels 1 to 5 anymore, you know, I am getting those feeds across Twitter. But it’s a constant balance, it’s a constant juggling act, and what I try to do, especially in the holidays, is take a day out where we leave, you know, they leave their technology at home and we go out and we go to museums, we go to parks, and we have a different type of learning where you’re sort of walking around a museum and learning about history. So that they understand that they can use a different part of their brain to learn and absorb information. What I worry about with my children as they’re growing up, especially the eldest, is the online bullying, is that kind of the bullying that you can get as she gets older, as, you know, she has group emails with school. I just worry about what kids are saying to one another and also being shamed for, I don’t know, you know, there’s body shaming out there, there’s lots of the way they attack online, and I worry about that. I worry about a whole group of people seeing messages about a particular person. It’s another kind of online bullying form. And I also worry about content. She’s getting to an age where she’s asking questions about, well, we come from a Muslim background, and she’s asking questions about about what’s happening in the news when she sees terrorist attacks. She’s asking about Donald Trump, you know, what kind of president is he, why does he not like sort of Asian people. And so it’s a lot of stuff is coming out now that I have to filter with her and speak to her about. As they get older and older, I will worry about imagery, imagery of women, pornography, which is huge on the internet. I will start to worry about those things and the influence influences that they can have on, on my children, especially when they start to get more curious and find their own paths through the internet to look for material. That does worry me quite a bit.

Speaker F: Well, of course, all parents of young children want to protect their children and to gradually expand their horizons, I suppose, as they get older and more mature and able to handle different content. But do you think that this is something the government should get involved in?

Speaker H: I do think the government have some responsibility to help parents in terms of content. There’s a lot of race crime out there, there’s a lot of genderphobia, there’s a lot of issues out there.

Speaker D: There’s—

Speaker H: you’ve seen in the news that some people through online bullying and revenge porn and so on and so forth have, you know, taken their lives and been quite suicidal. So I think as the internet and technology gets bigger, then the government has to take some sort of action, because if criminal activity is taking place over the internet, then there needs to be some laws to protect children.

Speaker B: So if the little digital natives are so good at this stuff, why worry? Bjorn Jefferies invented Tokka Pokka. A highly successful online game platform for children aged under 8. And he wants all devices to have a kids mode like airplane mode on their smartphones.

Speaker I: If you go on an airplane, you turn on flight mode, and that has a long list of consequences where instead of cellular transmission and Wi-Fi turned off, this, that, and the other, because it’s the context that you’re in is I’m on an airplane. Plain, so therefore I want to be able to use some things but not necessarily all of them. This is the obvious solution for kids. I’m handing over this device to my kid. Kids mode therefore has these consequences: you cannot access my text messages, you cannot call someone inadvertently, you cannot make purchases that were not authorized. All of these things, that should be the default and the standard out of the box, and then we can go further from that point. But all of these things that create this perpetual fear of like, are they gonna buy something now? Suddenly, am I gonna get a bill for this? Are they gonna send something to my text message? Are they gonna accidentally tweet something to my company’s corporate Twitter account that I have pre-installed? All of these things that happen constantly, that should not be a concern for anyone. Like, we need to put all of that to rest. So a lot of this should be handled on a platform level, and there should have been a kids mode. And there has not been one and does not seem to be one on the horizon either, unfortunately.

Speaker B: Is what you’re saying that have the device and use it for these particular things and that we get this almost sort of identity separation on the device, which to an extent we are sort of moving toward or we have had with passwords, or is what you’re saying that there needs to be a platform form that is actually specifically built for the child.

Speaker I: I think it’s more the identity part of it. I think realistically, if it’s just— it’s about the device and sort of the what content’s being shown, what purchases can be made, how data is handled or not handled, you know, privacy by default, these sorts of things could all be, in my opinion, a flip of a switch. And then all the software that wants to be available when the device is is in kids mode, you need to comply with all of these things. You would have automatic self-compliance. We’ve already seen this a little bit when Apple launched the kids category on the App Store. They put harder and stricter rules in place. So if you want to be in this kids category that they’re merchandising and promoting, you need to adhere to a stricter standard for certain things than you would if you put your app in the general App Store. Vast majority did. You know, they were happy to do that, and that because it’s a good incentive. And I think this would be the similar thing. If you, you can hope that self-regulation among all of these things, not just in kids’ tech but in tech in general, is going to work. You know, that’s questionable whether that has taken us as far as it could have. So I think in this case it might be, it might be easier to say, well, look, this is going to be a huge, you know, if the button is as prevalent as the airplane mode, this is something that a lot of parents are going to want to use. Do you want your software to be available to parents in that mode? If so, these are the things you need to adhere to. And if— had we just done that, that would have been a huge step forward. And I think that would have given parents a lot of comfort in feeling like, well, at least, yeah, I’m not going to get a bill. At least this data is not going to be farmed out to some ad network somewhere if I’m doing it in this way. So that would be a start.

Speaker B: How about education though? I mean, do the parents need to be educated?

Speaker I: It’s a question of who would take that on. I think the need is real, and that’s been my perception, that there’s actually a huge lack of information, credible information, like, how should I relate to this? Even from very young kids, you know, when is it okay to introduce some form of screen-based entertainment for kids? All the way up through teens having— my kid is getting a hard time on Snapchat. They don’t even know these people, but these things keep coming up, and it’s 24/7.

Speaker B: It’s a very powerful and dangerous technology, isn’t it?

Speaker I: It is indeed.

Speaker B: One of the things that we ask people to do if we’re going to let them have a gun is we say you’ve got to be properly trained if you’re going to use this gun, and you’ve got to keep it in certain places.

Speaker I: Not where I live, but in most parts of the world, yes. And that would be be a good idea even where I live too, but unfortunately that is not the standard to which America is held currently. But yes, it would be a good idea. I think what I’ve said is, I think there’s, there’s, there needs to be some sort of authority to look to. I think that’s the problem. There is no authority to go to and it doesn’t need to be sort of an official government institution. It could be an Oprah, you know, who’s the Oprah of children’s technology, someone that you can go to and that out of all the things that are out there, points to something and says, “This is great. This is fine. We’ve looked at it. We’ve assessed it. This is a lovely piece of technology. You should go with this. This, however, is awful, and you should not do that.” Someone that just gives a little bit more guidance. And this is— there’s very few instances that do, because it’s very undercovered. And the people that do cover it in journalism, it’s rare, you know, that you really go into the depths of it. And again, as we were saying before, It’s probably not something that the parents may even read because they don’t think that that’s what it’s going to be about. They assume that this is something completely different. So there’s that. There’s also very few kind of, you know, nonprofits, institutions. It’s not sort of an interesting subject enough to be really dealt with. So if you’re, even if you are very hungry and you’re looking for information about how do I want to do this, you are one of the lean forward active parents thinking like, right, I gotta educate myself on how this works. Even if you’re one of them, it is very hard to find good information.

Speaker B: What is novel is that the new trend, as we have found, is to teach children what is being done to them through offline tools. Geolocation games to demonstrate tracking, books that demonstrate programming concepts to them, the use of card-based questions to find answers. It’s simple stuff. If you saw a large company trying to entice your child into a shop on the high street You’d say, “Sorry, we’ve something else to do.” Yet online, we cannot quite see what they’re up to, and their terms and conditions are evasive and don’t tell us. Even our children have noticed and are asking for simplicity, clarity, demos, and the ability to ask questions. Chris, #Missina, has now taken time out from Silicon Valley to find out for himself what harm it has been responsible for. I’ve called him Hashtag because he’s the person who invented the concept of the hashtag, and protecting children is now part of his new quest.

Speaker A: Manipulation by itself I don’t think is necessarily wrong. It’s non-consensual manipulation. Because for example, when I go to a horror movie, I’m actually wanting to be manipulated. I want my fear to be brought up. Like, that’s why I’m paying money to see a director’s work that basically makes me feel scared for a limited period of time. But the problem is when that becomes non-consensual, when it becomes coercive, where people are then manipulated in ways that they’re not aware of, that’s when the trust starts to erode and when social fabric starts to decay. I think there’s a way of looking at the propagators of a lot of these social media platforms and technologies and there is a deep culture within Silicon Valley of— the game of Silicon Valley is a type of contest that’s kind of like American football and gambling. And you kind of bring those things together. You’ve got a bunch of teams and everyone wants to get on the field and the bets are placed and then the victor— to the victor sort of goes the spoils. And the spoils are like enormous, right? We’re talking like millions and millions of dollars. And so it’s a game that a lot of people really are interested in playing. Regardless of the outside outcomes that might occur.

Speaker B: And there’s a particular culture, isn’t there? You’ve got this venture capital culture where they’re actually almost grooming people.

Speaker A: Well, they’re the league owners, right? So we figured out a sport and we’ve got a bunch of people who want to get on the field. And for example, it’s not that far off to think about the concussions that people are getting in American football and to look at like the owners and to recognize, look, this is just what’s going to happen. If you play this sport. There are going to be casualties, and people know that getting into it. And we’re going to pay them a lot of money, we’re going to have them wear out their bodies, and then we’re going to replace them. And it’s an industry. I think that it’s not sufficient to just say, oh, the sort of team owners or like the captains of the league are like responsible for this. We set this up because of the broader capitalist system that we live in. So I just like, I saw that and I saw the press and I’m like, this is going to be an infinite story that keeps evolving where the press is shaming Silicon Valley tech execs, but really they’re just saying that they don’t like the sport. And the problem is like the sport itself is fundamentally flawed for the benefit of humanity and long-term human flourishing.

Speaker B: Because the aim is to buy, to build trees for the Google Street. It’s to get the various different apps that will continue to build and make this street. And the venture capitalists are saying, yeah, that’s ‘Yeah, that’s an idea that fits. Yeah, we can, we can put that into the street.’ And that’s all they’re interested in.

Speaker A: I think it’s— there’s not enough vehicles, in a sense, to figure out how to use that venture capital for a set of outcomes that don’t just have a return that’s financial. In other words, like, how do you look at the reduction of climate change as being something you can meaningfully measure and then create a sport around who’s going to reduce their impact on on climate change the most in a way that has an index like the stock market and says, here are the people who are winning and losing. So we haven’t done that sort of broader contextual work because we’re so early in this process. I mean, just remember, like, we’re— the hashtag was created in 2007, so it’s been 12 years since that point. I don’t know how long it took to start the stock market or like any of these things, but we have gone through such a rapid technological change and we have scaled up so quickly because the Industrial Revolution gave us the ability to scale and propagate changes throughout society very quickly, that we’re now having to confront an enormous amount of changes across an enormous number of people across an enormous geographic space in a way that we’ve never really had to deal with before. So we’ve made ourselves really, really efficient and really, really powerful, but we’re kind of like, oh, we didn’t really stop to think about or have any way to know— well, maybe we did a little bit, but like we didn’t really really know, besides maybe sci-fi movies and stuff like that, how this could possibly go wrong. And now some of those things are going wrong.

Speaker B: It’s power without responsibility.

Speaker A: I mean, it’s power without foresight. And I don’t know, I’ve been like reading about and thinking about a lot of people who have gone through a process themselves of kind of coming to the realization and taking some vague responsibility for what they’ve done. But then you still kind of get, I think, shamed. And it goes very deep.

Speaker B: What are your solutions?

Speaker A: I mean, it’s— I’m worried that, that my solution, like, isn’t sexy enough and isn’t interesting enough. And that’s okay, because of all the things that I thought of that I could possibly do, I don’t know, like, building another company or starting anything like that to, to try to sort of stem the tide isn’t necessarily the answer. I think, one, my story is useful because the thing that I created has found a certain amount of success in pop culture, but I didn’t choose to pursue the positive upside of that success like my friends’ companies did. You know, my friends built Twitter, they built Instagram. Like, I was there at the beginning. I was the 19th user of Instagram. Like, I’ve seen it grow, but I chose not to cash in in the same way that my friends did, either because I’m stupid or because I had a different set of values and a different set of goals and outcomes. When I got to Silicon Valley, I was excited about bringing the benefits of technology to as many people as possible because I came from a I grew up in a small town in New England, and I was able to take advantage of some of the privileges that I didn’t even know I had by publishing and sharing my story on the internet. And I wanted other people to have that ability as well. The hashtag was never meant to be something that was about me. It was about contributing to this broader ecosystem and platform for people to contribute their voices. And that has happened, and there’s been negative consequences as well. And so I’m trying to look at those things and not be too naive, but also think about, well, what was it about the culture that was in place in 2006-2007 that was either undeveloped or immature or may have led to these things? And if we had listened better, if we had been more empathetic, if we’d slowed down to see the negative— I mean, even recently Biz and Ev from Twitter have said, yeah, you know, in the beginning we really weren’t thinking about about all the people complaining about abuse, all the people of color who are being attacked, because they didn’t feel the pain.

Speaker B: What’s the hashtag now? What is the hashtag? Is the hashtag this? Is it #technologicaldebate? Is it #technologicalcrisis? What is it?

Speaker A: No, it’s #betterhumans. That’s what I’ve come down to. And again, like I said, it’s not very sexy, but what I’ve realized is that we are looking at technology to solve the problem for us. When we ourselves, we have to think of ourselves as technology.

Speaker B: So where does this leave the Members of Parliament who, if they survive prorogation, will have to legislate on online harms? Jane’s been talking to Ian Lucas MP, Labour MP for Wrexham and a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Digital Media, Culture and Sport. He hopes to make MPs and parents better informed and make the online harms bill fit for purpose.

Speaker J: The report, or the white paper, is a good initial step. It does begin to deal with the issue of responsibility for published information on media platforms. It doesn’t do so as clearly as I would like. Obviously this is a consultation paper, so one of the purposes of the consultation is to make that more clear than it is at the moment. That’s necessary. But I think what it establishes is that social media platforms have responsibility for what they’re actually publishing on their platforms.

Speaker F: When you say responsibility, do you mean legal responsibility?

Speaker H: Should it be a crime for them to publish publish things that are harmful.

Speaker J: Yeah, but just because something— someone has legal responsibility for something doesn’t mean that they are committing a crime. I mean, for example, in a factory workplace, if someone breaches the law, then they can become civilly liable for whatever they do wrong or in breach of the law. So I think I’m a lawyer, so which is probably why I take that particular viewpoint, but I think it’s important with a very specific piece of legislation in a new area to be very, very specific about what we’re talking about. So we’re not talking about sending people to prison for putting things or allowing things to go on their platform, but we are talking about creating responsibility, and that responsibility can, can stretch across a very a wide range of, of sanctions, if they’re sanctions at all. And it also then begins to ask some questions like, is the responsibility to regulators? In other words, is it only a matter that the, the Information Commissioner would deal with, or the Electoral Commission, or the appropriate regulator? Or does it create responsibility which enable individuals to take action on the basis of what’s in the platform? These are some of the questions that, that are not yet clear from the white paper and which need to be drilled into to make sure that we make some progress.

Speaker F: Of course, one problem in protecting children and young people from online harms is the question of age verification. Anyone can say anything online. A 5-year-old could pretend to be 15 or 50.

Speaker J: Yeah, absolutely. You make a very valid point, one that I’ve raised on numerous occasions on the select committee with different platforms. And what they say, the honest ones say to them, to me, is that there is no safe age verification or valid age verification process at the present time. And, and I get very frustrated by the answer because, you know, people have made billions of pounds from media platforms and dollars since, since they were set up. And age verification is very important because my constituents in Wrexham, they get very animated by these issues, by the way that social media does affect individuals, very young children. And we really, unfortunately, we’ve taken a very laissez-faire approach to this to date in that we’ve We’ve kind of allowed the situation to develop without really addressing our mind to the age issue and the way that young people can be adversely affected.

Speaker B: Ian Lucas from the last parliamentary select committee of the Department for Digital Media, Culture and Sport. While Parliament’s not sitting, the online harms continue apace. The World Health Organization reports that currently one person commits suicide somewhere in the world every 40 seconds, and we know that internet harms are adding to this. Cybercrime is at record levels, and opioid addiction has become a serious problem in the United States and parts of Africa, facilitated by online drug dealers who supply prescription painkillers in super strength doses. That’s before you even start to worry about sexual predators using chat rooms and video games to groom their child victims. But let’s not forget, the technology itself is not the problem. It’s the business model that makes all of us even 18-month-old toddlers into the products that the technology industry sells. As long as we can remember that, we can find a way to navigate the online world and find our way to the good stuff or the off switch. Thanks for listening. If you want to find out more about the ramifications of technology on your lives, you’ll find more of our programs on Mixcloud, or you can go to our website at www. Futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker I: Goodbye.

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