Alex Cooney: We have rules for the road, why not rules to keep kids safe online?

Today is Safer Internet Day 2022 and Alex Cooney of CyberSafeKids has three suggestions to keep our children safe online

Tue, 08 Feb, 2022 - 00:14

Alex Cooney

Today is Safer Internet Day 2022, a global initiative that provides an annual opportunity to shine a spotlight on how all users, and children, in particular, can be safe and smart online.

When this event first launched back in 2004, we were still largely connecting to the internet on our desktops and laptops since it was before smartphones were invented, and the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat didn’t yet exist.

The iPhone, which first came onto the market in 2007, has made a tidy profit for Apple in the intervening years (helping it to become a $3 trillion company in 2022), but beyond that, the invention of the smartphone has revolutionised our world by putting a computer into our pockets.

A wise person once said to me, “when we give our kids a phone, we give them access to the world… but we’re also giving the world access to them”. The world our children are growing up in is significantly different from the one in which their parents were raised.

The invention of the smartphone has revolutionised our world by putting a computer into our pockets.

The opportunities are hard to quantify, although the various periods of lockdown over the last two years certainly underlined how much we rely on our devices for learning, socialising, and entertainment. They provided a vital way of staying connected and it was no different for our kids.

But alongside the opportunity, there is also risk for children online and the reality is that as a society we are failing to adequately prepare them to mitigate against the inherent risks: exposure to harmful and inappropriate content, sharing too much personal information online in a way that makes them vulnerable, cyberbullying and online grooming and extortion. The latter two categories saw an alarming increase during lockdown.

Alex Cooney: What we must do to ensure our children are safe and happy online

CyberSafeKids believes we need to put in place fundamental changes in society to support children to have a safe and positive experience online. If we think about something like road safety, there are a range of measures in place to support children as road users.

But where is the proper legislation to ensure accountability and penalties in relation to online safety; and where is the public funding and political drive to deliver public awareness campaigns to encourage good behaviour and proper education in schools to teach kids how to protect themselves?

The online world was designed by adults, for adults. Children are largely being treated as adults in those environments and existing safeguards are often add-ons and frequently inadequate.

We’re suggesting 3 key changes:

Regulation and Legislation: We have the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill coming into force in the near future, and this should push greater accountability onto the Big Tech companies in relation to the harmful content they host. We need to make sure it’s as strong and robust as possible — including an individual complaints mechanism so that members of the public have greater power to remove content that harms them online (in the case of a child being cyberbullied online over photos or videos for example). We also need to put in place ethical design standards to ensure safe and responsible use that are mandatory so that new services launching must adhere to them and existing ones need to retrofit their sites accordingly.
Education: We must have mandatory online safety training in schools; whilst schools do cover this content to varying degrees and there are some fantastic resources available from Webwise and others, we need this to form a core part of the curriculum — the 4th ‘R’ alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. We need all teachers to benefit from training and for there to be at least one teacher who is a digital champion in each school. We are kickstarting this campaign by offering schools a free service called ‘CyberSafe Tool for Schools’ to support them on their journey to being a more CyberSafe school.
Parents: We must run multiple public awareness campaigns that are designed to support parents to become effective and informed digital parents. We don’t even think about how we parent our children to bike or cross the road safely — it’s often instinctive because we were parented on it ourselves. We must see good digital practice become the norm in households across the country.

Safer Internet Day comes around once a year, but for us, the focus on keeping kids safe online is daily. Our charity is not and never will be ‘anti-tech’ for children – we believe it’s an essential part of their lives.

Our mission is to equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to safely navigate that online world in which they spend so much time, and ensure the online world has all the necessary safeguards to protect them from the darker aspects within it.