On Thu, 1 Jun 2023, Spencer Graves wrote:
How could we organize a maximalist campaign like Henning suggestswith a reasonable chance of winning? And how can we combine that with a contingency plan that has a high likelihood of allowing us to disengage with minimal losses if it becomes clear that most likely alternatives involve much larger losses?
Here is what I propose:
We rephrase the matter at hand demonstrating some important aspects to the issue, for example (the list is not exhaustive):
- that children are autonomous subjects, not just objects to the parental control
- more often than not it is children that are in control of the Internet access at home, for example helping parents to set up their smartphones
- very important but hard to raise is the issue of discoverability: it is not true that we only deal with websites and "content", all of it looks like a shopping mall where people walk by, but there are many ways to carry out conversations ("transmit data") in the today's networked world. To make it very short, we have to distinguish between the pushed and pulled information. More often than not this will require limiting of "push" channels such us spam and advertisements. (Simplifying here a lot).
- jumping from something very general, to something very specific, I wonder how Among Us fared after introduction of pre-defined simplified "quick chat" in the app for kids under 13 in February 2021. From my personal observation (would love to find real data for that), this killed the app in that demographic immediately. I use this example to show that maybe we can have potential support not only among the usual suspects, like, for example, independent and SME game developers.
What we could do is to organize a series of events where kids/teens (invited to Brussels from all over the Europe, for example as a result of an on-line competition organized by us) actually demonstrate how their online life looks like, where are the dangers and what are the precautions they take (or not). Also, how they avoid all those filtering and content control measures. I find it fascinating how even young kids take measures to protect their identity on-line, for example.
(Some of you might have heard from me that I have attended a similar workshop organized by the European Commission many many years ago, bringing teens from a Polish high school to Brussels. It was amazing to see how the presence of well prepared young people literally smashed the efforts of the firewall lobby ready to offer products for parental control, everywhere).
I think we do not have to look far to find such people; we have probably the best ones in our community already.
Marcin