Why We Need Devices for Children

Type: Blog Post

Date: 16th June

Yesterday's announcement from the nation's favourite, Kier Starmer, of a social media ban for under-16s might have seemed like common-sense at last. However, the ban comes with a host of privacy, censorship, and overreach concerns for adults, while kids are instead pushed to unregulated services, if they don't easily find a work-around for the ban (a VPN–shh!). Phones for kids are an attractive solution to both of these problems: age checks happen at point-of-sale rather than tying our online and offline identities together, while restrictions apply beyond just a handful of popular platforms and keep the open web open for the rest of us.

With TikTok leading the way, over the past decade, social media platforms have been tweaking their platforms to make them more addictive. As is common for digital platforms, initially they offer high-value services for both users and advertisers, leading to rapid adoption from both. Once they gain dominance, growth stops, and so these businesses extract the value from services to increase revenues with their existing customers. So, addictive design is the user's gift from the digital advertising business model and its relentless pursuit of maximising engagement. The most successful platforms are then those with strong network effects — Uber, Facebook, Instagram — keeping users locked in despite lower-value services. Despite more and more ads, despite the algorithm demanding more and more of your time, you are still on the platform because everyone else is too.

With the number of court cases against addictive design's harmful impact on kids rising, now seems like the perfect time for government to do something. However, an outright ban risks pushing kids into unfamiliar spaces with fewer child-focused design options. Alternatively, children lose access to their controlled social media account, but secretly gain access to an unrestricted adult account instead. Either way, parents end up losing control over what their child does online.

Instead of banning just a few online services, through age checks which can be circumvented using your device's VPN, devices designed specifically for children should be promoted by government. With age restrictions built-in client-side, work-arounds will be much more difficult, while harmful content could be filtered no matter the service you are using. This anticipates the open web's endless alternative sites, some of which will doubtlessly lack proper safe checks. Parental control will also be enabled by default, rather than only by the most tech-savvy parents. Only 35-51% of parents currently make use of such controls. While demanding a more expensive change in hardware*¹, software restrictions will always struggle from being invisible*² to parents.

Purchasing unrestricted devices could require showing ID, providing a more robust system for limiting underage access to harmful online content. With a separate class of devices for children, parents could be educated about the concerns for children's use of unrestricted devices at point-of-sale, too. Crucially, this avoids adults having to tie their online and offline identities, since restrictions are all implemented through the device, respecting everyone's privacy. As a result, device-led age restriction avoids overreach from governments wanting to investigate or censor your online activities.

We can recognise that service-based restrictions on an open web will never work, or risk making the web more and more closed until government finally implements "Hadrian's Firewall" to decide who gets to participate in the internet.

#OnlineSafetyAct #UKSocialMediaBan #SocialMediaBan #OSA #UKNews #UKPolitics #SocialMedia #Privacy #Technology #Ethics #TechnologyEthics #DigitalID