Data Protection Bill [HL]

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments. I remind the House of my interests in relation to my work at TES, the digital education company.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the others who have supported the amendment have given the Government a pretty neat way out of the problem that 13 as the age of consent for young people to sign up to “information society services”, as the Bill likes to call them, feels wrong. I have found that for many Members of your Lordships’ House, 16 feels like a safer and more appropriate age, for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has just given in terms of defining when children are children. There is considerable discomfort about 13 in terms of where the Bill currently sits.

However, I think many noble Lords are realists and understand that to some extent the horse has bolted. Given the huge numbers of young people currently signing up to these services who are under 13, trying to pretend that we can find a way of forcing the age up to 16 from the accepted behavioural norm of 13 looks challenging. Yet we want to protect children. So the question is whether these amendments would provide that solution. That hinges on whether it is reasonable to ask the suppliers of information society services to verify age, and whether it is then reasonable to ask them to design in an age-appropriate fashion. From my experience, the answer to both is yes, it is. Currently, all you do is tick a box to self-verify that you are the age you are. If subsequently you want to have your data deleted, you may have to go through a whole rigmarole to prove that you are who you are and the age you say you are, but for some reason the service providers do not require the same standard of proof and efficacy at the point where you sign up to them. That is out of balance, and it is effectively our role to put it back into balance.

The Government themselves, through the Government Digital Service, have an exceedingly good age-verification service called, strangely, Verify. It does what it says on the tin, and it does it really well. I pay tribute to the GDS for Verify as a service that it allows third parties to use: it is not used solely by Government.

So age verification is undoubtedly available. Next, is it possible—this was explored in previous comments, so I will not go on about it—for age-appropriate design to be delivered? From our work at TES, I am familiar with how you personalise newsfeeds based on data, understanding and profiling of users. It is worth saying, incidentally, that those information society services providers will be able to work out what age their users are from the data that they start to share: they will be able to infer age extremely accurately. So there is no excuse of not knowing how old their users are. Any of us who use any social media services will know that the feeds we get are personalised, because they know who we are and they know enough about us. It is equally possible, alongside the content that is fed, to shift some aspects of design. It would be possible to filter content according to what is appropriate, or to give a slightly different homepage, landing page and subsequent pages, according to age appropriateness.

I put it to the Minister, who I know listens carefully, that this is an elegant solution to his problem, and I hope that he reflects, talks to his colleague the right honourable Matthew Hancock, who is also a reasonable Minister, and comes back with something very similar to the amendments on Report, assuming that they are not pressed at this stage.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My noble friend made a very strong case. The internet was designed for adults, but I think I am right in saying that 25% of time spent online is spent by children. A child is a child, whether online or offline, and we cannot treat a 13 year-old as an adult. It is quite straightforward: the internet needs to be designed for safety. That means it must be age appropriate, and the technology companies need to do something about it. I support the amendments very strongly.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend Lady Kidron. Last week, with her and my noble friend Lord Best, I was able to attend a briefing session with the right honourable Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State. I found that very helpful. We were looking at the Green Paper on internet safety published on 11 October. It is curious that we are here in Committee talking about some of the same issues when that significant consultation is being undertaken by the Government. I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, comes to reply to the debate, he will say something about how the Government intend to synchronise the discussion of and consultation on the Green Paper that is under way with the moving horse of legislation that is proceeding through your Lordships’ House.

During our discussions last week, my noble friend raised again the duty to protect. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just said about this providing an elegant way forward. I guess that many of us would want to turn the clock back if that were possible, but we recognise that it is not, and this may well be, therefore, a better way to proceed. It is certainly one to which the Government should be giving considerable attention.

While I am on my feet, perhaps I may remind the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, of the amendment that I moved with my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss during the debate in April on the digital legislation. I particularly draw his attention to col. 40 on 20 March and the remarks made by his right honourable friend the Minister of State for Digital in the other place on 26 April, when he described the question of prohibited material and definitions, which we had argued should be consistent across varying media platforms. They both said that this was unfinished business that would be returned to. I have studied the Green Paper but have not been able to find the solution to that unfinished business, and wonder whether it will be addressed as the legislation proceeds.

Perhaps I may also ask the Minister about the protection of minors. It has been stated again and again, by all noble Lords who have participated so far, including the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that the protection of children should be a paramount consideration at all times. The Minister may recall the case, which I raised with the Secretary of State and in your Lordships’ House, of some young people who had visited suicide sites. I was horrified to learn from the headmaster of a school in Lancashire, where I arrived to distribute prizes, that a child who had visited a suicide site had taken their own life only that morning. What further protections are being provided to require service providers, for whom self-regulation is clearly not enough, to do rather more about that question?

It has been said that parents do not have a chance in this situation; that is absolutely right. As my noble friend Lady Hollins said, young people spend a vast amount of time on the internet. Many parents do not understand how it works. It is therefore crucial that we do all we can to place pressure on the service providers. I remind the House of the advice that Aristotle gave parents. He said that only a bad parent would place their children in the hands of a foolish storyteller. I fear that many of us, maybe inadvertently and without knowing the full consequences of placing our children in the hands of the Twittersphere and the digital world, with all the information that pours into their minds on a massive scale, have placed them into bad hands. We need to do more to protect them. This is what my noble friend is trying to do and I commend her amendment to the House.