25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox for bringing a party to the House and apologise for raining a little on the parade. I declare an interest as having recently made a documentary film about teenagers and the net. I am specifically raising the issue of how data relate to young people today.

Unlike the early cry of “free, open and democratic”, we are all aware that the web has become monetised with a value that is entirely dependent on harvesting data—data created by our interacting as much as humanly possible with the commercial platforms on the web. The millions spent on the vast and incremental experimentation of combining neuroscience and technology to keep us attached to our devices is not disputed by those who do it, but it fuels a culture of compulsion, disclosure and distraction that has a particular implication for young people who are not yet fully formed.

Our young people are growing up with devices that act as their telephone, post box, camera, scrapbook, family album, newspaper and school pigeonhole. In using those devices they routinely relinquish ownership of every interaction, private and public. It is worth reminding ourselves that, in this context, the data we are talking about are actually the intimate details of young people in their period of greatest personal developmental and social change. It is as if we are taking their bedrooms and putting them up for sale on eBay. We have allowed a situation to develop in which it is legal for a multibillion dollar industry to own, wholly and in perpetuity, the intimate and personal details of children. We all know that this space is moving so fast that we do not really know what might happen to it in the future.

In every other part of life, children are children, and we take a view on their level of maturity and accompanying levels of responsibility. We protect them from every other addictive substance. On the net, it seems, we are asking that they take responsibility on their own, even as we denude them of power over, and ownership of, their own histories.

I did want to come to the party. I was an early adopter and I love the internet. It has delivered previously unimaginable opportunities that hold within them the full gamut of human creativity, but it is not without cost. We have a responsibility in this House to ensure that it is not the next generation who pay the price. In July last year, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that,

“when it comes to the internet in the balance between freedom and responsibility we’ve neglected our responsibility to children … So we’ve got to be more active, more aware, more responsible about what happens online. And when I say we I mean we collectively: governments, parents, internet providers and platforms, educators and charities”.

I could not agree more.

At 25, the world wide web, unlike many of its young users, has reached the age of maturity. What better celebration could we have than designing and putting in place a regulatory framework that protects young people from the routine collection of their data, to be stored and sold in perpetuity without any recourse or protection?