WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO KEEP CHILDREN SAFE ONLINE?

The conversation around children and digital safety has grown rapidly around the globe, but its strands are still being treated separately. Age restrictions are being debated on one side, privacy on another, algorithms elsewhere and grooming and online sexual exploitation in another corner altogether. A child experiences all of these in the same digital environment.

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Bringing these strands together is the real purpose of this report.

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Drawing on legal and policy developments across 40 countries, 10 regional and multilateral frameworks and 12 UN instruments, it brings together age restrictions, contractual capacity, parental consent, platform design, recommender systems, commercial profiling, privacy, age assurance, reporting, remedies, regulatory powers and cross-border cooperation. It looks at the law from both ends of the problem: who should be allowed access and, once a child is there, what the service itself must be required to do.