Violence against Women and Girls: Smart Glasses
Debate between Satvir Kaur and Shockat Adam(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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Satvir Kaur
Ofcom is fining platforms, but I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Member. Do I believe that all platforms are doing everything possible to root this out? Absolutely not. Do they need to go further? Absolutely.
Shockat Adam
Further to the intervention by the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) about profitability for social media platforms—and going back to what the shadow Minister said about how the manufacturers of these products intend to be good—I think we may be being a little naive. The company that makes the most popular smart glasses on the market is worth £28.5 billion. These are very smart people, and they know how these things can be utilised. Does the Minister agree that the product manufacturers hold a great deal of responsibility, and that we must be able to legislate for that as well?
Satvir Kaur
The hon. Member will have heard me talk at the beginning of my speech about designing out the problem. That is really targeted at manufacturers—an Apple or a Google—rather than the platforms themselves. One example of us going further where tech companies have failed is device-level controls. We need to nip this in the bud rather than allowing it to get out of control, and one way to do that is designing out the problem in the first place.