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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

11/02/24 07:30 AM IST

Child safety online

In News
  • In early February, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided a public apology to parents whose children were victims of online predators during a Congressional hearing.
Risks in Child safety online
  • Across the world, parents and activists are aggressively advancing the agenda of having the tech companies take responsibility, or provide platforms that are ‘safe by design’ for children and young users.
  • A UNICEF report of last year, ‘The Metaverse, Extended Reality and Children’, attempted an analysis of how virtual environments may evolve and how they are likely to influence children and young adults. These technologies do offer many potential benefits for children, such as in the areas of education and health.
  • These include safety concerns such as exposure to graphic sexual content, bullying, sexual harassment and abuse, which in immersive virtual environments can feel more ‘real’ than on current platforms.”
  • Further, vast amounts of data, including about non-verbal behaviour are collected, potentially allowing a handful of large tech companies to facilitate hyper-personalised profiling, advertising and increased surveillance, impacting children’s privacy, security, other rights and freedom.
  • There is the mental health aspect, with children facing the prospect of trauma, soliciting and abuse online, which can leave deep psychological scars that impact lives in the real world too. Innocuous and innocent sharing of images online can also be twisted by depraved predators.
  • End-to-end encryption is essential to protect the information that children share online.
Pros & cons of AI
  • The Davos World Economic Forum in a paper last year explained that generative AI brings potential opportunities, such as homework assistance, easy-to-understand explanations of difficult concepts, and personalised learning experiences that can adapt to a child’s learning style and speed.
  • “Children can use AI to create art, compose music and write stories and software (with no or low coding skills), fostering creativity,” it says. For children with disabilities, a world opens up as they can interface and co-create with digital systems in new ways through text, speech or images.
  • “But generative AI could also be used by bad actors or inadvertently cause harm or society-wide disruptions at the cost of children’s prospects and well-being,” the report records.
  • Generative AI has been shown to instantly create text-based disinformation indistinguishable from, and more persuasive than, human-generated content.
  • AI-generated images are sometimes indistinguishable from reality. Children are vulnerable to the risks of mis/disinformation as their cognitive capacities are still developing.
  • There is also a debate about how interacting with chatbots that have a human-like tone will impact young minds.
Rules for safety
  • Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF offers guidance that lists nine requirements for child-centred AI, including support for children’s development and well-being, and protecting children’s data and privacy.
  • UNICEF recommends that tech companies apply the highest existing data protection standards to children’s data in the metaverse and virtual environments.
  • In addition, governments have the burden of assessing and adjusting regulatory frameworks periodically to ensure that such technologies do not violate children’s rights, and use their might to address harmful content and behaviour inimical to children online.
  • Everyone must start from the assumption that all the rules that exist in the real world to protect children, should also prevail online.
Source- The Hindu

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