Backing up David Cameron’s pledge to protect children from harmful online content, the Online Safety Bill 2013 gets a second reading in the House of Lords on 6th Dec 2013.
The Bill is essentially in three main parts:
– Duty to provide a means of filtering online content. Manufacturers will be required to provide customers with a means of age-appropriate filtering at the time of purchase.
– Duty to provide information about online safety. ISP’s and mobile operators will have to provide easily accessible, clear information about online safety.
– Duty to educate parents of children under 18 on online safe. The Secretary of State must provide means of educating parents of children under the age of eighteen about online safety.
Naturally there have been lots of discussion and confusion about this. In particular the media don’t always help by confusing the issues between inappropriate adult content and illegal content (e.g. images of child abuse – (not child pornography as the media keep calling it!!))
Other discussions have been around the fact that filtering is simply a first step to censorship or that filters tend to block a lot of appropriate content such as support sites. Unfortunately that is the way filters work; you can’t expect a piece of software to make a human decision, and schools know this very well. A filter is a minor safeguarding tool, not a silver bullet, and what’s more they are easily circumvented.
I will be very interested to see how the government is going to educate parents. This is by far the most important aspect, and also the most difficult as schools will attest. Parents evenings are by and large poorly attended, and those parents who really need to turn up are usually the ones that don’t.
I’m hoping there is some synergy between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Education so that there is a link between what schools are doing educating children in these matters, and the same messages going home to parents with appropriate support for schools to make that happen.
Personally, I am very wary of the Online Safety Bill. I completely understand why this is happening and I give the government a big thumbs up for bringing these issues, at last to the forefront. But I can’t help but feel that this is being rushed, that it will be driven by people with little expertise in this complex area, and it will cause a significant amount of confusion leading to disinterest or worse, apathy.
I am remaining positive and hoping that I am proven wrong, but having worked in this area for many years the issues just aren’t as simple as the solutions being offered (or legislated).
You can read the Bill (4 pages) by downloading the PDF from HERE.