FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"connecting CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
02 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:00
CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION: ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES, BEST PRACTICES, AND CHALLENGES.
HOST COUNTRY SESSION
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The file is the roughly edited output of the realtime captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. The following is roughly edited.
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>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Good morning, everyone. I'm not the Moderator, but the Moderator is going to be a little late. So chat amongst yourselves, and we will be starting in about five minutes.
Thank you.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Hello everyone again. We just had a chat. We will start, otherwise we will overrun. And we will switch to the Moderator when he arrives. Until then, I'll try to best moderate this as best I can.
So we will start with a presentation from Larry Magid, who is from the U.S. And Larry is going to kick off and also introduce himself, if that is okay. So over to you, Larry. Thank you.
>> LARRY MAGID: Can the PowerPoint come up?
Thank you very much, Susie. This is Jennifer Haroon from the Internet Watch Foundation. I'm Larry Magid, and along with my colleague, Ann, who is with us.
Before I start my presentation, I'll do a commercial. We are sponsoring two workshops that will be of interest to people in this room. Ann is doing one at 2:30, 14:30, Thursday, on digital citizenship. And she passed out some cards. And I don't have any cards, but I'm doing one tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. called "Child protections and child rights." And to try to understand how you can have protections of children and also protect their rights as well. Because sometimes protections actually take away rights, and we're going to explore how we can enhance that. So I'll invite everybody to join both the workshop at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning and also the workshop Thursday afternoon.
I'll talk about -- next slide, please.
I'll talk about for a moment the evolution of online safety since 199 4. Next slide, please. I have it. What do I do? I don't know how to do this. Maybe this one? Which button?
I apologize here. Technical problems. If you could just manually do them. There are only a few slides. Okay. Thank you.
So in 1994, 20 years ago, I had the privilege to write a booklet called "Child safety on the information highway." It was published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States, which as many of you know is America's centre which helps protect children, find children who are missing, help children who are sexually exploited, and it runs the cybertip line. +++ But this was early in the days of the Internet. Without the basis of research or experience, I was asked to write a booklet on how to protect children. And I've spent the last 20 years trying to undo what I did back then. I'm joking. But what we thought about then was pornography and predators. So that was the focus of the online safety field for the first maybe five or ten years of its existence. Then we began to have the benefit of both experience and research. And even though many, many articles were written about predators, and there was a very popular television show in the United States called "To catch a predator," when the Crimes Against Children's Research Centre, funded by the U.S. Government, justice Department, did an investigation they found out that the number of children that they had an aggressive solicitation of a person that they never met before online was low. But if you're worried about children being harmed by predators, you should look at clergy, priests, rabbis, any religious leader, police officers, parents, uncles; that the Internet was safer in many ways than the real world when it came to predators. But that was a focus of concern and it's still the focus. It's not saying that there are no predators online, there are. But the odds of a child being solicited were low relative to other dangers.
So we, as the result, had to get away from that, finally, not to say it didn't exist but we stopped focusing on that. Pornography has been around for a long time, since the days of the caveman. Even though it's an issue in many places and countries, in the United States, at least, we have not been able to show a significant amount of psychological damage that has been done because of online pornography. The Internet has been around for 20 years, children used it for about 18 or 19 years, so we have children like my own children who are in their 20s who grew up on the Internet, had access to it, and it turns out that psychologically they seem to be just as well adjusted as children who grou up before the Internet.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't moral or cultural reasons to be very concerned about pornography, but it has not caused enormous social problems, at least in the United States and Western Europe, where we have been able to measure it.
Another important issue about Internet safety is sexual abuse images or child pornography. We at Connect Safely recognize that this is important. And we allow the hotlines and police officers to handle it. We put that aside as an issue and we are grateful that the Internet Watch Foundation works on that. We don't comment.
+++ So we put this to a cyberbullying panic. In, 2008, +++ Ann Collier and I served on a panel in the United States where we investigated the dangers of the Internet. And we found that the children's biggest risk was themselves and each other, bullying and harassment. So suddenly a huge focus in America became on bullying. And people started thinking if you go online, you are bullied. We found that it is a significant problem, but it's not an epidemic. Upwards between between 6 and 20 percent of children were affected by it, but the vast majority are not bullied. So it's not to say that we don't fight against bullying, we do. But we don't think it happens to every child online.
Reputation management, digital citizenship. All areas that were explored in Internet safety and now we are beginning to evolve. The Internet safety world is beginning to understand security and privacy are very, very important. So it's impossible to talk about safety without security and privacy talks. They are part of the evolved discussion of Internet safety.
And then we move into resilience and self respect. You can protect children all you want. But at the end of the day, children can protect themselves. And so teaching resilience and self respect, we found by looking at the research, goes an enormous way of protecting children. It's not about adults protecting and filter monitoring, the children have to respect -- and I think Ann will talk about that and I'll talk about it on my rights panel.
Understanding that all are not equally vulnerable. One of the mistakes we made in the United States was that we had an education system that assumed that every child had an equal vulnerability. Some children are much more vulnerable than others. Children with conditions like autism have a higher vulnerablility. Children with serious psychological problems have a vulnerability. Children from homes whose parents are abusing alcohol and drugs have a vulnerability. Children who come from homes with parents who don't talk to them, who don't listen to them have a higher vulnerability. So we have to address children that are the most vulnerable. It would be as if we went to, I don't know, let's say London and started worrying about Ebola but didn't worry about it in Liberia. You have to focus on where the problem is. London has different problems. It has problems, but Ebola is not one of them. Liberia has problems. So you have to focus where the problems are.
And this is what I put in red, most importantly, Internet safety is not about the absence of danger. Because it's about the presence of positive outcomes. We go on the Internet to accomplish, entertain ourselves, educate ourselves, and socialize and trying to be more positive. So we are really focusing on that.
There are risks in life. We all know that. Here is a quiz. Who do you think is best able to protect children. Government? Raise your hands. Police officers? Law enforcement? Teachers? Parents?
It's a trick question. The answer is -- the next slide. Young people themselves. At the end of the day, you can have all the best police officers, the best Government, the best parents, and the most wonderful teachers, but the young people have to be resilient and protect themselves. And ultimately we talk about monitoring. And I know there are filters in many schools and countries filter the entire Internet to prevent things that maybe should be changed and not looked at by children. But the best filter is up here. You can filter the phone, Internet, the nation, but this is what matters. It's not just about Internet protection. It's about understanding critical thinking, about avoiding unnecessary risk whether in the car or marketplace.
When I got into a taxi yesterday and was told it was 25 Lira to get from Taxim to the hotel, I said it only cost me 6 Lira to get here. Well, it tipped me off. It's critical thinking. It's knowing how to be self respecting and respecting other people. So filters really have to run here.
Fear and exaggeration. A lot of people think -- there is a term called "scared straight," that what we need to do with children is make them afraid and therefore they will be more cautious. When you look at research -- and there are people who study this -- that when you over -- when you exaggerate fear, when you exaggerate risk, it increases danger. It doesn't decrease danger. So when we say that bullying is an epidemic, what we're really saying is bullying is common. It means it's normal. And if it's normal, it must be okay. If everybody is doing it, I'm doing it. By exaggerating it, we are increasing the risk. If you lie to people, if you misinterpret facts, people tend to react in a negative way.
We had a campaign in the United States called "just say no. D.A.R.E. to keep off drugs." They scared children into thinking the first time you smoke a marijuana cigarette you wind up being an addict. It backfired. And the people who run the programme revised it and now they use an educational system based on something that children can understand and appreciate better.
So what we are advocating is a social norms approach, where you really help people understand what is normative behavior. And guess what? Normative behavior in this world is kindness, it's positive.
Skip to the -- one slide and then another. Skip quickly. One more. The wrong way. One more. One more. One more. One more. Skip.
So very quickly, we are launching a new campaign called One Good Thing. Onegoodthing.org. It's a campaign to surface the wonderful things people are doing online.
We want to embrace the positive and show the great things that children are doing. Visit onegoodthing.org and tell us one good thing. Tell us one good thing that kids in your country are doing, so we can share that with the rest of the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Okay. So I'm going to carry on attempting to moderate this. I have to apologize to all of our speakers to say I can't get online. So, basically, I would like to ask the speakers to introduce themselves when I turn to you, please, if that's okay. Also, I ask the speakers to speak for only ten minutes so we can have some discussion. But also, I think it's really important that we acknowledge that we're in Turkey. It's our host country is hosting this session, so I think it's important that now we hear from the Turkish representative to understand what is happening in Turkey. So I'll pass it over to you now and please introduce yourself.
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: I'm head of the Consumer Rights Department of ICTA, Information and Communications Technologies Authority of Turkey.
I want to talk about the Turkish experience and the importance of this issue. Today I talk about the importance of Child Online Protection, online threats. I believe that sharing experiences regarding Child Online Protection will contribute all of us and hence I'll try to share our experiences about this issue.
My presentation is as follows. I would like to first mention about Internet trends and I'll touch about Turkish legislation and I'll focus on Turkish experiences, and I'd like to make comments about Child Online Protection.
Internet administration is increasing all over the world. The use of tablets and computers at home tripled between 5 and 15 years old. Apart from that, usage increased rapidly, and maybe we can count lots of teens in order to say why is the Internet use increasing? It's ease so to access information. On the other hand, children can be exposed to harmful content on the Internet and that's why we try to find out the solution for the problem.
Within the authorities, the national regulatory bodies and NGOs should work together in order to ensure that children access online information in security. Empowering children, it's important how we can educate our children to -- not to impose harmful effects of the Internet, and protect children from harmful online content, and of course prevent child abuse in the online environment.
In fact, I do not focus on Turkish legislation but I would like to say a few things about Turkish legislation. Turkish legislation is 5651. It's the law number 5651. This is our main legislation. It's enacted 2009. Based upon this legislation, we enacted our second legislation in 2011. The name of that legislation is Bylaw on All Principles and Procedures Concerning to the Safe Internet Services. I want to say how we can protect our children with the legislation.
As I said before, previously, 5651 empowers our authority to protect our children on the online environment. In that legislation we also defined some crimes. And if you find out there are crimes on the Internet, we blocked to the Web. When you look at crimes in the main legislation law, the crimes mentioned in the law are sexual abuse of the children, obscenity, prostitution, facilitating use of drugs, providing gaming, and encouragement and incitement of suicide and supplying hazardous substances for our health.
Our secondary legislation is Bylaw on Principles and Procedures Concerning Safe Internet Services. Safe Internet. It explains safe Internet services in our country. In accordance with this secondary legislation, it's consumer rights given to every customer to choose Safer Internet Services. It's important to highlight that existing access service of the subscribers, if they do not request these services, will continue to provide it in its present form without any change. It is highly important. So we can say that Safer Internet Services is a freedom of choice.
In those services there are two profiles which are child friendly profiles. In that services if you -- if the consumer wanted to use Safer Internet Services, the consumer can only inform the operator via Web Pages, call centre, SMS, and substitution agreement, and the operators that provide solutions between the profiles and between family profiles or child profiles or opt from the safe services, at any time.
In this light, you can see the number of subscribers using Safer Internet Services in Turkey in 2014. When you look at the numbers, it's about 1 million subscribers.
Another issue that is maybe higher importance than Safer Internet Services is to educate our children. This is very, very important. In our authority, between three years, we educate one or two computer experts from 82 Governmentships. We collect them in Ankara and we educate them how can explain Safer Internet Services, how can explain students, this issue. It is really very important. And then when they return to their home States, they educate other experts from that area.
Also, we make lots of conferences in the schools, nearly I think 400 conferences. We gave a conference in our cities all over the country, not only in Ankara but also in the eastern part and western part of Turkey. So our colleagues want to do many things to make conferences and express the importance of Child Online Protection.
And we also distribute relevant information. We also prepared TV spots, and then we also broadcast all the TV spots on our main TV channels. I think that it is not enough, but it's a big step to educate our children.
We know that Internet is official. That's why one of the main names of our organisation to widespread Internet usage is all over the country. It's a high priority. But on the other hand, to protect children from harmful online content is important. That's why we try to empower our children through education and also provide alternate Internet services to our users who want to use or who prefer to use the Safer Internet Services.
We are happy to share our experiences and willing to benefit from your experiences in order to find out the correct way to protect our children from online child -- Child Online Protection.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Thank you very much. That was really interesting, particularly understanding the context of the country where we're based today and understanding the trends and the work you're doing, which is really interesting. Personally, I find it very interesting the different legislation, and I'm very interested in following that up.
Could I ask the speaker at the end, because I think we have another speaker from Turkey, yes? So I think we should get another Turkish perspective, and then we will hear about what is happening in the Philippines and then what ITU is doing. So I'll just hand it over. If you could also introduce yourself and stay to ten minutes, that would be great. Thank you.
>> DOGAN UFUK GUNES: Thank you. Before I start my words, I want to state happiness that I feel for Internet Governance for this taking place in Turkey.
It is same that the Regulation --
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Could you speak up a bit, please? Thank you.
>> DOGAN UFUK GUNES: It's great that Turkey hosts such a great organisation, the Internet Governance Forum.
The number of Internet and mobile phone users has gradually been increasing. The ITU, International Telecommunication Union, stated that three billion of the people shall have Internet access until the end of 2014. Likewise, it is predicted that the number of mobile phone users shall reach 7 billion until the end of 2014.
Speaking of figures, I want to today present the data from Usage Research of Household Informatics Technologies, the research in 2013 in our country. According to this research carried out by the Turkish Statistical Institute, the starting age of computers in our country is started at eight and the starting age of Internet is nine.
Today, while Internet is intensively used especially by the young population, it has become the field that the children and youngsters use most intensively for education, socializing and fun. So the socialization and the fun.
Studies to raise awareness regarding protection of children from harmful content of the Internet is growing, and it's at the biggest part of this. Besides the modifications of law and regulations, primarily in safe Internet application, we work to prevent children from being exploited. The word "exploit" does not contain the obscenity matter. The threats that may occur in the virtual world to our children means exploiting of these very young minds.
Protection of children and youths in Internet is a necessity that is super-governmental and super-political. It's a national measure. I think International cooperation is important. Our country has signed a cybersecurity agreement with 49 countries, including the United States of America and European countries. I pay utmost attention to the studies to be performed within this agreement.
In this sense, it's a sign that we all share the same wishes that there is such a topic in this important meeting. I believe that speeches that shall be performed here and decisions that shall be made here shall enlighten us to make our next-generation geniuses that discover new talents by the Internet, not victims of the Internet.
Thank you for listening to me.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Thank you. Now we will hear from somebody talking about industry. Do we have some remote participation? Do you want to share that with us, please? Thank you.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: "I appreciate the topics raised. I worry one critical element is missing around the Internet producing a tendency towards instant gratification in children who are being raised feet first with an onslaught from various media ads. Commercial organisations are investigating heavily in identifying users in order to advertise and profit from their eyeballs. What considerations at the Internet levels are being taken to identify underaged users to facilitate future protection?"
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Thanks for that interjection.
We have three more speakers, including me if I get a chance. If not, we will just open it up for discussion because I think there are a lot of perspectives around the room. I'm happy to forego my presentation because I think we can get good interjections from the audience.
Could we have one quick -- a quick question after the last speaker?
>> AUDIENCE: Just a quick question about Turkey. We heard that there are 1 million Internet users in Turkey. Or 1 million subscribers to Safe Internet Service, correct? How many households -- almost one million users --
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: It is the number of Internet users that are subscribers, Safe Internet subscribers.
>> AUDIENCE: What portion of all Internet users?
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: There are 35 million subscribers, 35 million Internet subscribers we have. But only one million is Safer Internet subscribers.
Okay?
>> AUDIENCE: And then just one other question. Is net service, Internet service, mostly on computers or mostly mobile in Turkey?
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: Mostly mobile, of course. Nearly 9 is fixed, others are mobile.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: I should ask, is the Moderator here? Because they can take over. No. Okay. You've got me, still. We will keep going.
So now I'll move over to a colleague who is going to give us an industry perspective from Manila. And also finally introduce yourselves as well. Over to you, if you could stick to ten minutes is the maximum. Thank you.
>> MILA PILAO: +++ Good morning. I'm based in Manila, but we have offices here in Turkey.
So I'm coming from an industry that started 26 years ago. We have been in charge of looking into the Internet security and we have adopted a lot of solutions. But I'm coming here as a perspective of what private industries like us have to do with Child Online Protection.
I've been personally -- I'm Mila Pilao, based in Manila, but I work globally to help evangelize a lot of the threats that we know today. But I'm passionate about this and it brings me to my relationship with some of you guys on +++ Child Online Protection.
I've been in the industry for over ten years and I think there are a lot of things in the security world that have definitely changed. Ten years ago, a lot of the attacks that we see are pretty much, we call them virus, malware, now we call them cyberattacks. A lot of things that we have seen in the past are skewed to enterprises, very skewed to anything that has money. Anything that has information gained. What we have seen about four or five years ago was a complete game changer. Because at the time the market was looking into big Government enterprises as potential victims. Sadly, the last five years we have seen the growth of children becoming not just conduit, but also victims themselves. And there are -- they are a very small voice in this industry.
And another observation in trend marker +++ as a security company is, number one, a lot of the kids have been exposed to what our peers were talking about, inappropriate images and content. Some of the factors that we see is the advent of connectivity, the power of mobile, the access to a lot of information online. Obviously all these things have brought about where we are today. From where I come from, we see about five billion threats every day. That is a huge number. 30 percent of those threats that we see are coming from social media. 20 percent of them are targeting kids. And that I think is a scary number.
Some of the things that we have seen is, essentially, are kids being consumed behaviorally online. For us we can consider that obviously probably an area we can solve. But the two areas that we see definitely that has been transcending very fast is, number one, is children are now being used as conduits to major cybercrime and cyberattacks. To get into us, to get into adults, to get into a lot of our information, they use the kids first. Then they are able to get in through our information. That's one thing.
The second is admittedly we have also seen the children running as victims to a lot of these cyberattacks.
I believe in my last two minutes I'd like to focus really on we have two perspectives when we talk about parental control and technology. One is the children are definitely the area that we could like to talk about. But remember, on the attacker's point of view, the people behind a lot of these things, it's always going to be a game of hide and seek. In the past, it is very easy to see them. It was very easy to detect them online in forums, because they use a lot of key words that for us sounds like okay, you're the bad guy, right? But today we have seen that they are using a legitimate company to run by their forms of attacks, again targeting the kids.
Second, they are using legitimate platforms and social media is number one. For us in the industry, and when we talk about parental control, our job as industry leaders, our job as parents becomes harder because it's going to be a hide and seek. It will be very difficult to trace them.
I believe that in terms of parental control, I'm not a big fan of the control portion. I believe it's parental guidance. Two things we have to look into is what gets into the kids' platform and, obviously, what gets out of it. Those two aspects. And I think technology is just one major partner for us as adults in helping take care of our children's safety online.
But it's not the end all. It's not the best solution. I believe that every conversation, dinner, family or otherwise, should -- they should actually put security as part of that conversation.
In the company where I come from, and in a lot of the advocacy that we do, we change a little bit how we see protection for the kids. We believe that Internet safety for kids and family is more stronger in the fact that parents have to be adept, have to be intimate about the security threats just before they move forward and guide their kids.
Let me end with a fact that, as I said earlier, the benefits to a lot of what we see in the power of connectivity and the power of mobile, et cetera, are just humongous. If we have one way to do it as we leave this room, our biggest take away is how do we turn our kids to the goodness of the Internet, to the goodness of mobile? And I think that hopefully we will solve many of the problems that we face today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Thank you very much. I think we're getting a number of perspectives here. We have had the Turkish perspective. Larry laid out the issues young people are having to face. We have heard from an industry solution and now we will just hear from ITU before we open it up. So if he -- sorry, okay. And we are just going to hear from them and they will just fill us in on what they're doing, okay. Thanks.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: +++ EBU is the European Broadcasting Union, the main association of the European Broadcasters. And we are also the focal point within the World Broadcast Union. That means the eight unions representing broadcasters of the world for Internet policies. And we have national members all around the world. And in Turkey our member is TRT. That is the national broadcaster.
The trusts in of our viewers and our listeners is the most important value that we can have. So the children programming and the specialized children channels are in need to establish a trustful relation with the users, especially the young viewers, and the parents. So for us this is a question of primary importance. This is why, as the association of broadcasters, what we try to do is to help to exchange best practices between our members.
We try to identify which are the best solutions through common problems and to export from one country to another, of course with the necessary adaptation to the different situations, to the different cultures and background.
It seems that the digitalization of the TV signal happened, and in Europe this happened two years ago, in 2012. We entered as broadcasters in the same field as the Internet. We are living a digital converged world. This means that some of the previous safeguards that we created in the broadcasting world doesn't apply anymore. For instance, you probably remember that before the main protection that you can have in broadcasting was to put problematic programmes at late night. But once you have the catch up TV you can access this programme at any time in the day. So the original programming safeguard in terms of timing doesn't work anymore.
Then you have also the signal that you can put on the air, still important, but less important than before. Because you can say that it has to be seen with parental guidance, but if the children watch it when the parents are not at home with them or not with them, so the importance of this signal is lost.
So we have to adapt this to the new world. And there are a certain number of issues that cannot be solved at the national level, need to be solved at an International level. For instance, this is the case for age recognition. For us it becomes crucial especially when you have to -- you have now 25 percent in the most digitalized countries have access that is not linear, that comes through catch up TV or other systems through the broadband. Then the identification of the age of the user is very, very important. But as you know, this -- this does not match all countries. In some countries you use the credit card, in others you use the driving license. But this is not a standard, even in Europe it's not a standard, so it's problematic.
What we are doing then is at the national level, the broadcasters, they cooperate with the other interlocals that were mentioned in the beginning, that's of course the police, law enforcement, the judiciary with the school system, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, there is tight cooperation with the specific authorities in charge of broadcasting or now more and more the converging broadcasting and Telecom World. But also there is an International level of activity that is very important and where the EBU union tried to make it work on behalf of the members. This is where we come in cooperation with the ITU, that's the only global regulatory body that we have in the world for telecommunication and broadcasting.
In the ITU there are two main activities that probably you are very familiar with. One is the Child Online Protection group. That is a group that embraces ITU members but also Civil Society and organisations.
The second is the specific counsel Working Group that has been created by the Secretary General of the ITU, to focus on this issue.
And there are other activities that are less known that are equally important. For instance, there is, within the group of the ITU dealing with cybersecurity, there is a specific Working Group in which we are trying to identify standardized technologies that could be applied worldwide for supporting security on the online for children especially.
This brings us also to the fact that all this is seen under the frame of the UN Convention for the protection of children. That is the only two that we can use worldwide.
A caveat is important. For us, as public service broadcasters in Europe, it's equally important the protection of the children's rights as well as the Freedom of Expression and other human rights. We cannot create a hierarchy because this is more important than others. So we prefer by far a self-regulated environment where this is possible, of course, with laws that are simply putting the framework very clear. But then we leave this to the position of the industry. Because the risk that you use laws that are supposedly for children protection for other kinds of restriction, it's very dangerous, and of course we don't agree on that.
Last point I want to say is that the broadcasting plays a very important role in this transition phase, because it could create awareness. As the authority, the Turkish authority mentioned, the Union in Turkey TRT carries on advertising. But there is a channel called TRT Cortuk, where they do specific programming explaining to the parents and children how they have to avoid the most important risk that they could find. So this is a very crucial role that we need to play, and we are ready to play in cooperation with the association in the field.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: You heard from all the speakers. Now so we will open it to the floor. We have a few questions. What I'll also do is try to get input. We have got actually some young people sitting on the floor in the back there. So we will actually ask them to give a better response. You're hiding, but we know you're there.
So I'm going to just take maybe three comments or questions at a time, and then we will move on. There is one here, and then there is one there and one there, please. You need to speak into a microphone so that people can hear and it can be transcibed. And try to keep points pithy and to the point.
>> AUDIENCE: Patrick Curry +++ from the British Federation Authority, and I'm a rapporteur on the ISO, which is doing a study period on age verification.
And this originates from a change in South Korean law which requires all parents to be given the controls to be able to control their children's access to the Internet for a range of services. And in the International discussions, other Governments and nations have put in their requirements into the study period. My -- I'm not really asking, I don't think, for clarifications. But what I would like to do is to offer the terms of reference for that study to any organisation that is interested, we would absolutely welcome participation.
I'll be in ITU-T in two weeks' time. We are doing a comparison of standards between ITU and ISO in this space. And again I would very much appreciate any input from any nations and experts into that dialog.
And I should point out on Thursday I'll be on a panel on Internet Governance and it's to do with an EU project called "Mapping." And mapping the Internet. And as part of that, one of our partners is Interpol. They will not be there. But the Interpol Child Protection Committee is aware of this activity and some national representatives are also involved in that dialog. So, on that point, thank you.
>> LARRY MAGID: What age do they define "child?"
>> AUDIENCE: I don't know. But if I may come back. The International view is although it's called age verification, the decision was made it's not just limited to children. It's any situation where you have a requirement for someone in authority or has caring responsibility for someone who is unable to act safely in their own way. So this includes old people with dementia who are equally very vulnerable on the Internet but in different ways.
>> LARRY MAGID: Ann and I served on the Internet safety task force, and I can only speak for the USA, where we spent a year verifying age verification. And the only way to do that is to access records which are inaccessible such as school records and Social Security records. And it brought up unnecessary consequences. One is a database of children, which if it got in the wrong hands could affect children and/or their privacy. when you talk about older children, especially teens, sometimes it's in their interest to not be under their parents' authority when it comes to free speech. And I know this isn't going to play in the whole world. We have many teenagers in America who are questioning their sexuality. They might think that they are gay or homosexual, and the parents are upset. We have had suicides in America because of gay children who are being suppressed by their own parents. We have situations where children were sexually abused by their parents and they go online to seek protection. So there is a danger of parents controlling their access and then denying them the availability to have free speech.
>> AUDIENCE: There is a rainbow of challenges that we have seen in all sorts of areas particularly in certain societies which have very different values. The point I would make is this actually calls into question another tension which is called privacy and how low do you go regarding privacy and how does that relate to the family and health and families.
>> LARRY MAGID: I invite you to the other session.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: There are four other online child protection sessions. So I think a lot of us will be in the same sessions so we should just try to develop the discussion as we go. And that's why I've been so generous in dropping my presentation because you'll be sick of hearing from me for a while.
So two other points.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Nate Schenkkan from Freedom House. I wanted to bring attention to the impact of a stronger control model on Freedom of Expression and access to information, and I want to thank the Turkish Government representative for listing the aspect of 5651 that justify blocking. But the Turkish Government stopped publishing reports about what websites were blocked and why, in Turkey, in May 2009. So it's been over five years since we have had official information. There is monitoring by Turkish society in Gelliweb. It's 51,000 sites that are blocked in Turkey. And this includes, and we know this from the tracking that everyone does, this includes sites that publish journalism. In particular, this year, we had sites like VaGO TV, sites like Yeni Donem that were blocked after corruption investigations.
So there are -- "suspicions" is far too weak a word. There is a large part of Turkish society that is convinced that the Web is not being restricted for protection of children or the other things that go along with the Convention that Turkey signed, but is being filtered for political reasons. And so my questions are: Why are the 51,000 sites blocked? Are they all blocked in compliance with Article 8? In addition to that, why did the Telecommunications Authority stop publishing the reports and will the Telecommunications Authority commit to publishing transparency reports that say what sites are blocked, that say why they are blocked, and that make it accessible for researchers and Civil Society to see the court orders and to see the reasoning, which is the basis for any kind of reasoned discussion about it?
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: I would like to answer why we blocked 51,000 -- 51,000 Web Pages, why the Telecommunication Authority blocked. I would like to answer this question.
The main reason is court decisions. In Turkey, you know there is 5651. In accordance with that law, the Telecommunication Authority has to comply with what the court decision is. And all of these websites are blocked in accordance with court decision.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: This is a huge issue and it will come up in every single session. And I respect the fact that you brought it up at this session and I think we could just talk for the rest of the session about this, and I'm sure it will come up in lots and lots of sessions about blocking and overblocking. But this is Child Online Protection, and I hope I'll pull it back to that it.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from the German Centre on Child Protection for the Internet. And concerning what was said by the panelists, I think we have on the one hand safeguarding of children. And if I put in "controlling," which can be done by a technical means by parents that control tools, and we have been talking about education and empowerment of children. And I really appreciate your comment, Larry, when you said what do you think of the child? We refer to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that it's a person up to 18 years. But we all know that we cannot take a child of ten or twelve years and treat them the same way like 16, 17 years old. So to my opinion, we need somehow the safeguarding for the younger children and more empowerment for the older children. And maybe we can talk a little bit about where do we see the age border, where we only need empowerment and where we only need the safeguarding for the young ones.
Thank you.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Can I take a straw poll of the room? Obviously a lot of countries and in the UK now we have mandatory opt in choice, if you take -- from any of the four ISPs, parental filtering. So I want to take a view of the room. How many people feel that parental filtering works?
(Showing of hands)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: That's not many people. And feel free to come back on that. Right.
So let's hear from people we haven't heard from. Before that, I know you're hiding down there, so one of you has to jump up and talk to us about what you think about parental filtering. So let's have a view from a genuine young person.
It's not like I know they're shy, because they will talk at lots of other sessions.
You need to speak into the microphone, Olivia.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from the Danish Youth Panel, from Save The Children.
I heard a lot of talking about this, where the filters, they work for smaller children. But you can't put filters on for children my age. It doesn't work. Seriously. Maybe you can try to put up filters, but then I'll go to my friend's house and see the exact same thing and then I'll come home and then I'll be wondering why can't I see these things? Why do you hide things from me? You can't just hide the world from your young people. I want to know about the world. Then instead of filtering me up, you have to teach me, you have to be with me in the world. You have to sit down and talk about the world. Yes, there are a lot of bad things going on out there, you can't just protect me from them, you have to talk with me about it. Then I can understand what is actually going on.
Yes, that's bad. Okay.
It's better to talk about it than just putting up filters. Yes, you can't just let a four-year-old go around the entire Internet. Then be with your child on the Internet. You have to sit beside them and talk. Yes, how to do this. You can't learn it on your own. You have to help your children instead of trying to control them.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Let's take some other comments, questions. It can be about that or something else. So we have one here and have we got any more -- so one and then -- yes, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Mandy Yamanis, and I work for World Vision on a project across five countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
I wanted to make a comment for this gentleman here in the broadcasting. One of the recent countries we're working in is Albania, where Internet access is fast expanding. Not many Internet laws in place yet. So a lot of work needs to be done. But one of the problems that they identified was finding the right between child rights and freedom of expression. And in the TV channels, what they often have is they have a streaming underneath main TV programmes or news programmes saying "hi. My name is David, and I'm 16 and I'm looking for a girl, blah, blah, blah." And they are streaming these sort of invitations to meet young people on national TV. And this is an issue for us and I just wanted to see, you know, your views. How could we overcome this? Again, I say it's a balance between child rights and the Freedom of Expression.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: As I said, we tried to spread the best practices. This means in some countries that there are bad practices. EBU gathers only the public service broadcasters or in some countries still state broadcasters. In Albania, we have as a member RTVSH, that is the national state broadcaster. Now it is supposed to be a public sector broadcaster.
What you are talking about is advertising. There it's linked to the fact that in certain countries there is less attention for putting the advertising. They are desperate for getting resources, because the license fee for instance in Albania is very, very low. So I don't know -- I don't think that our member does this in Albania. I think probably the commercial channel does. But even if it happens, the explanation is that they are desperate for resources.
Even in Western Europe, we, the broadcasters, put a limit to the advertising that they can get. A very huge restriction. A huge number of restrictions. In countries where Regulation is not yet improved, this is not the case.
So what we are doing for instance in Albania and all the other countries that we are participating with the EU to updating of the national legislation in order to introduce changes or introducing new chapter organisations that doesn't exist before. Because before there was no eAdvertising other than the state industries that were giving advertising on the basis of what the party decided.
So we are trying to modernize the legislation and put it on the level with the rest of Europe. And this will immediately provoke the data that will be implemented, to stop this kind of phenomenon.
On the other side, thank you for this. I will check with my member there. If they are aware of the -- they are aware of the problem, but they have this kind of problem also. I cannot disclose.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: We will take a question or comment from Ann and then over from ECPAT and then over here as well. Ann first.
>> AUDIENCE: This is a question for everybody. I've heard many references to parents and education and the importance of parents as kind of gatekeepers in a way and educators. But one thing that we discovered in one of the earlier task forces in the United States was that the young people most at risk online are most at risk offline. And many of those young people don't have engaged parents. Don't have the kinds of parents who will, as Olivia put it so eloquently, who will work with their child and talk with their child and be in the world with their child. I thought that was a powerful statement. Unfortunately, some parents are in a world, a separate world from their child in many ways.
So what do we do for the kids on the streets, who are victims of sex trafficking? And how do we help them? I don't think Internet filters or a great deal of education will help them. And this is a problem going forward for all of us.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: So thank you for that. A question from a colleague, ECPAT.
>> ECPAT: There is the same thing in Costa Rica and TV channels. And that is a way of introducing children into child protection materials and prostitution.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Pass the microphone to Rachel.
>> AUDIENCE: I work with the UK Government, looking at how we deploy mobile identity and electronic identity. As many of you know, countries across Europe are using electronic identity, which enables you to sign up for -- if you have an account with your mobile operator, you can choose with the mobile operator to give the details to whatever website needs whatever details so that you can register. We have had a league of legislation passed in Europe that enables the mutual recognition of those EIDs and mobile IDs. What that means is that age verification is going to come into play. As we move towards a cashless society -- and you'll pay for your train ticket with your mobile device -- you have to pay based on whether you are a student or old age. So the mobile operators are working across the world and with the U.S. The national strategy for trusted identifiers and cyberspace is working to have age verification and EID. So if I move from Belgium to Denmark, all of my details will come with me and it's an easier process. If I need to buy stuff on line, if it's age restricted, within the next two years it will be possible for the transaction to know, for the relying part, for the company that I'm buying from to know what age I am.
So when Larry referred to the study that was conducted in the U.S. that was in 2008, an awful lot changed since then. So I think when we think about age verification, we have to think not just about preventing pedophile activity and bullying, but how we empower young people to engage in transactions online and how that cascades down to child protection.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Do you have any responses to the points so far or should we take questions?
>> MILA PILAO: I'd like to respond to the mobile verification identification system. I think that's a very good practice. A lot of companies right now in countries are supporting the image identifier. It's a good best practice. On the side of control is enablement, giving more accountability and responsibility to children. They see it as a way to partner with technology to become more effective citizens. I see a lot of movements around the technology doing that, more on enablement.
And I think the other portion on somebody mentioned about trafficking, I definitely agree with the fact that as parents become more mobile, and we can see this where I come from in Southeast Asia, a majority of the parents are normally working from abroad. So we see the -- their mobility and detachment. It becomes really an effect to the growing culture or values of the children. And I think it is no secret that Southeast Asia has a huge problem on children being trafficked. And one of the factors that a person has talked about is the absence of parents when they need them the most. So that is obviously attached to the growing concern of being an absent parent and how the values go as they go further as well.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Olivia and friends sitting down there again, can I ask you -- I wanted to ask you -- okay. Right.
So either one of your colleagues down there, Ann made an interesting point about how do you reach young people who perhaps aren't the informed, you know, people who have parents who do sit next to them. And what is your view about that? So how do we reach those young people? You're elected again. She is back. Okay. Okay.
>> OLIVIA: Okay, they don't want to talk. There I think the school has responsibility to educate the children as a part of the school. Because the social media and being on the Internet is such a big part of our lives now. And it's just going together with the way we are being offline. So I think the school has responsibility as well to teach us how to behave and to help us, to educate us. Because we all have to learn the same. It can't help if just half of the class knows it. It will help those, but as kind of a -- yes, together it won't help.
I think that it should be mandatory to have Internet behavior in school. And we should have some teachers who know this stuff. It can't just be the old math teacher who doesn't know what Facebook is. It has to be someone more qualified. It has to be qualified and interested. You have to sit down in a group and discuss issues. You all have to know each other, what do you think and what do I think and how do we want this Internet to be together? Just like some of us are coming here to talk to you guys, but it should also be more like you should talk about it in schools. If you learn about how the Internet should be, and then you get an Internet together with your friend.
I have an example with Olivia. Her teacher made this kind of sessions with them when they were in third grade about the cyberbullying and how to behave on the Internet.
They haven't had any kind of problems ever since. It clearly helps. But not all teachers are like that. That's why it has to be mandatory. Because then just half of the kids will know it.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: We have two comments here. If you can go first. Great. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Louis Bennett from the BCS in the UK. And I would endorse what Olivia just said. I think in the UK some of the most successful things we have seen are where there are partnerships between the school, the teacher, the school Governors and the parents, and they come together with the children so that they all talk to each other and understand the problems and understand the role that each group of people can play to improve the situation. So I would recommend that very strongly.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I want to thank our Turkish hosts for welcoming us to this meeting and encouraging this panel, which has been interesting. And I appreciate the comment about the complexity of dealing with children from a dysfunctional background. Clearly when we talk about that, we are not talking solely about online life. I don't think we can separate offline from online anymore. We're talking about inculcating children with values and self respect in a way that carries them through every phase of their life.
So I'm from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We are a Consumer Protection Agency where we have the responsibility for enforcing the Child Online Protection -- Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires parental permission for collecting information from children. And it was passed, Larry reminded me, in 1998.
So what comes to mind as we still enforce this law and we engage in policy development and promoting industry best practices, and spending a lot of time on education, what I'm hearing from the table is there were a lot of dynamic and fresh ideas from the industry perspective. And in an area where the technology and risk changes so quickly, I guess my question is this, and maybe to carry forward into other panels, how effective can legislation be for such a complex problem? Clearly you need criminal enforcement authority for certain types of egregious violations. But in terms of the structure and the way children are exposed to information and they use information, is legislation too heavy a hand? And might it actually inhibit the development of other solutions?
So I'm just kind of putting that out there for consideration, and now I'm always required to say that these comments are my own and don't necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission. I have to say that after I kind of jump off the ledge.
But anyway, I would just put that out there for consideration.
>> LARRY MAGID: I really appreciate that question and it makes a great deal of sense. We need to look at unintended consequences of well meaning legislation. Because a great deal of legislation -- we have to look at whether there is existing legislation in the nononline world that covers it, like harassment and bullying is already covered, and predator. And we have to look at the fact that technology moves faster than legislators do. And if you have to do legislation, you have to be broad, not too broad, but you can't be too detailed. You found out that with COPA, that there was technology that you couldn't imagine in 1998. So we have to move very carefully and thoughtfully.
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: As she said that, in fact, online is higher than offline threat. What I mean, social media is higher risk than other Internet media.
In Turkey, especially young people who use Facebook or social media, there is not -- the young people don't know the risk while they are online. That's why we're working to teach the risk of using this. It's important to reach the information to the young people. If you can succeed it, maybe we can solve some of the problem, because they are every day faced to using Facebook and other accounts. But the big companies don't want to contact with the users. They don't want to teach the young people the risk of the activity using.
But we had meetings, and we think that in Turkey we have to send a message to the young people to teach them the risk and to teach them what is the rates of the activity users. Maybe it's beneficial for those Civil Societies, and perhaps to the Government sides.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: I'll put Microsoft on the spot now and ask them to respond to that, if that's okay, and then we have a remote comment.
>> MICROSOFT: Thank you for the opportunity to respond, Susie. I'm the security adviser to Microsoft in the UK, and I can't speak to the other organisations. But I can say that we positively try to engage with our customers in terms of our services to ensure that they can use the Internet safely, wisely and well.
I would go back to a point that your colleague from the FTC made about the -- and the other colleagues made here about the unintended consequences of acts like COPA. It's an interesting observation that one of the first things that we teach our children to do in the consuming of services like this is lie. And it's a well-intended act, with a good intent behind it, but the unintend consequences, it teaches children to lie to get access to services in question that would otherwise be restricted against. They lie about their age.
>> LARRY MAGID: Microsoft is not alone in providing consumer information to parents. Facebook and Google invest money educating parents and children around the world. I can't speak for Turkey. But if you need access to the people I'm happy to introduce you to the safety staff at Google and Facebook.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: And I'd like to add that in the UK, the four ISPs -- BT, sky, Verison and Talk, Talk just committed 25 million pounds to a project called "Internet Matters" which is an online safety campaign. And we find, and I work for a company funded by the Internet industry, that actually they do fund this work because it's not just the right thing to do, it's bad for business.
>> AUDIENCE: Just a quick response. There is so much that could be said on that issue. User generated content is extremely difficult, because very often it's the content of people's lives, people's everyday lives. And we don't want to legislate that. But I think one important issue is definition. How do we define risk? How do we even define something as narrow as cyberbullying? We have been working through the definition of cyberbullying in our country for several years, and there still is not complete consensus. Young people often define it differently. They define -- they talk about drama. So cyberbullying is an adult word. They talk about things -- they talk about the way they socialize online and offline.
So definition is very important. And I know that Turkey has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And I would propose that each country that ratified it -- and I wish my own had -- but it really defines children's rights. And in defining risk online for children, refer to that document, because it provides a tremendous framework, provision protection and participation in the user generated media environment that we have now.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: We're going to take a comment from the remote participation, one more comment from Rachel, and then I'll ask the panel to give us a one-sentence summary and then we will be coming to the end of this session. So if we could take the remote participant, please.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: There was a question and a comment. First question, New Delhi, India. "There are many privacy projects going in the cyberplace like TOR projects, et cetera. If the children are going to use these technologies, which were especially meant for researchers, journalists, et cetera, then how the telecom operators will protect the children or any user from accessing the pornographic websites.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: That's a huge question. So I don't want to answer that. Anyone to answer that?
>> LARRY MAGID: It gets back to Olivia's point. You can't use mechanical means to protect children against content that they want to look at. It's not -- it's an education process, not a filtering process.
>> AUDIENCE: We developed the Internet Safety Guidelines that we rely on today way back in 1998, 2000. And if we're talking about unintended consequences of legislation, if you look at the Internet Safety Guidelines, they are based on a harm reduction approach and you create an adversarial position where children are trying to get around the measures that you put in place. And we give out warnings of not to put out personal information.
And I think one of the most salient points was about communication between people about the Internet, what goes on online. So we have to take a more holistic approach and look at what positive behavior, what the product of those can be, how to manage and engage in conflict resolution, what the issues are about well-being, how you manage your well-being, when and where you seek help and from whom, and how you identify a reliable source of help, the nature of interactions. So I think we need to move well beyond these five safety guidelines that we have been trashing out in the last years. And I think it would give the teachers the knowledge that they need to educate in a fantastic way.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: I'd like to ask you just to give us a sentence before we wrap up. Start at the end. Please. Do you have any final comment? We have two minutes. So very quick final comment from each speaker.
>> DOGAN UFUK GUNES: I think it's real nice, interesting for me and for my country. Industry and the protection of children from harmful content in our country is before us. We are very interested and we will learn. Thank you.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: Moving swiftly along. The final comment from trend Micro?
>> MILA PILAO: I think we definitely live in a very digitized world. We don't have an option anymore. We can push the rewind button and go back. But we have options when it comes to security rights and protection. And I think this morning's demonstration of everyone talking about Child Online Protection as a global issue is something that we have to applaud and pat our backs.
>> OZGUR FATIH AKPINAR: One of my experiences to you, when we go to the school and make conferences, we recognize that children is more high knowledgeable than the parents, even the teacher. That's why education is much higher than other methods to protect our children.
Thank you very much.
>> LARRY MAGID: I think it's about mutual respect, self respect, adult respect for the rights and intelligence of children. And the understanding that one size doesn't fit all when it comes to risk management. We have to look at every individual and their situation and not proclaim one solution for all of young people from birth until 18, and all the different risks and harms that are associated with them.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: It's too long to conclude in a short sentence. I think that the best thing is to see you around the next meetings. And especially I think that when the presentation on the guidelines on Friday at 9 o'clock, that we have done with the other industry partners under the umbrella of ITU and UNICEF, it will be useful to see you there and discuss that again. Thank you.
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: So just before we go, can I just flag out all the other Child Online Protection sessions. One tomorrow at 9 o'clock on child safety and child rights.
We have got one on online protection best practices forum at 9 o'clock on Thursday. And Sonia is at 4:30 tomorrow. So have a look through, because there are lots of different -- I've given this up. I'm not going to do this. It was a bad idea.
>> LARRY MAGID: How about a round of applause for Susie for filling in as Moderator. Great job.
(Applause)
>> SUSIE HARGREAVES: And thank you everyone for your participation and patience. Thank you.
(End of session 12:30)
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The file is the roughly edited output of the realtime captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. The preceding is roughly edited.
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