Queen’s Speech

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

The humble Address promised a data Bill and a British Bill of Rights but said nothing of the digital rights of children and young people. I declare my interest as the founder of iRights, a coalition of organisations and individuals which supports the introduction of digital rights for those under the age of 18. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, on her ministerial appointment. Her work in protecting children from sexual exploitation is exceptional and hugely admired, particularly by me.

However, the protection and safety of children must be balanced with rights and responsibilities, about which I shall make three points. The first I raised in a debate on 20 November last year, the substantive arguments of which can be found at col. 567 in Hansard, so I will be brief. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the gold standard for children’s rights. It is designed to articulate their rights and our responsibilities in every possible context. In the 25 years since it was inaugurated, a technological revolution has impacted immeasurably on the lives of children, but with no corresponding change to the provisions of the convention. Young people spend an ever increasing proportion of their lives online and it is imperative that the UNCRC reflects that reality. Therefore, I ask Her Majesty’s Government to advocate for a new protocol that describes how the rights embodied in the UNCRC should be interpreted in digital environments. The idea of making the convention fit for the digital age is gathering steam among other nations and it would be fitting for the UK to be at the forefront of this thinking.

Turning to my second point, we have existing legislation that could, if implemented, do much more to support children online. I acknowledge the privacy law firm, Schillings, for its excellent work in exploring this. I cannot do justice to the Schillings’ briefing as it interrogated vast swathes of consumer legislation, two decades of data and telecommunications regulations and a dozen or more Acts of Parliament, and we simply do not have the time tonight. But I shall give two glimpses of what it has been looking at.

Section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998 provides the right to make a “subject access request”—that is, request the precise reasoning behind any decision made by “automated means”. Few subject access requests are made by or on behalf of our young people. The mechanism is relatively unknown and operates on an ad hoc basis, website by website. Each automated decision has to be challenged individually, which is a time-consuming business for something that seems, in most instances, relatively benign.

However, how about when an online search of a disease by one member of a household creates a mark on those with the same ISDN address? Might that mark impact on a young person’s future employment, or ability to get a mortgage, or in ways that have not yet been invented because they have wrongly been marked a health risk? How might they reasonably be expected to challenge something they do not yet know has happened?

In another example, Schillings points to Section 5 of the Defamation Act, which goes some way to providing a legal framework for identifying anonymous online posters. But unless the perpetrator, once contacted, voluntarily reveals their identity to the victim or expresses a desire to take the offending material offline, the only recourse available is the court. Which young person has the confidence or the cash to defend their reputation in a courtroom? The young suffer reputational damage disproportionately, often without support, in bedrooms and classrooms all over the United Kingdom. I ask Her Majesty’s Government to build on the work that has already been done and to seek ways in which existing legislation can be routinely implemented on behalf of children and young people, and in doing so support a more responsible and transparent online culture.

Finally, the ubiquitous sight of young people’s eyes on a screen is not simply modernity in action but the result of billions of dollars spent gathering their data, creating a picture of their behaviour and their psychological DNA, and re-engineering it to extend their use and to deliberately keep them online. Sites whose content may in itself be innocuous use the same sort of techniques that keep gambling addicts on slot machines, with small random rewards to keep them hooked. The debate around children and young people cannot be about content alone. Age rating has a valuable place, most particularly for the youngest users, but we must also start to determine what level of compulsive technology, data gathering and personal profiling is acceptable as a method of orchestrating the online behaviour of minors.

Digital technology brings with it such vast opportunity but it is not entirely neutral. It is imperative that where the Government are considering the safety and well-being of children online, these considerations are at the forefront of the debate. There are many actors in the digital world—tech companies, corporations, parents, teachers and young people themselves—but if we are to deliver in the digital dimension the rights young people enjoy offline, the Government too must play their part.