Online Safety from the Awe Inspiring Canadian Rockies
On June 11, 2018, our own Shai Samet was sitting in the majestic Canadian Rocky Mountains with some of Canada’s (and the world’s) leading thinkers and producers of children’s media. The Banff World Media Festival hosted a panel called, Creating A Safe Place For Kids Online. The panel was moderated by Agnes Augustin (president and CEO, Shaw Rocket Fund) and included our Shai Samet (Founder and President, kidSAFE Seal Program), Annie Loi (chief commercial officer, DHX Media), Moyra Rodger (founder and CEO, Magnify Digital), and Marie McCann (senior director, CBC Kids, CBC).
One stat, shared by Agnes, is that more than 60% of parents have no clue about their kids online lives and viewing. This is a big number, but it would be a mistake to think that the majority of these parents don’t care about their children’s safety, both online and offline; online is tough though. In addition to there being a barrier of how do these things even work, the speed in which technology, and the products our children use, changes is unprecedented. The products your child loves this month may not be the products your child’s using next month, which means that all you learned about keeping your child safe on one product might not be relevant for the next product. So, there is a large ethical responsibility for the products themselves to ensure privacy and safety are core to the way they do business. It’s exciting for us to work with companies who get this and who work really hard to act responsibly. The buyer beware concept simply cannot be applied here, and in this governments all over the world agree. We all are aware of pieces of legislation like COPPA and the new GDPR, and the crippling blow to a company should they be found to be out of compliance. It used to be that it was just the big companies that were under the microscope, but lately we’ve seen more smaller companies being found wanting when it comes to compliance. But compliance with the various pieces of legislation only gets us so far in the effort to ensure a safe experience for children online. While these pieces of legislation do a great job of protecting children’s private information, there’s a lot of room for interpretation in how one applies safety standards. This is why our kidSAFE+ Seal deals with more than just legal compliance. And it’s why companies need to be thinking beyond privacy compliance when creating new content or products. As an industry, we need to be striving to take what we know about protecting children in the physical world, and putting the same priority of protecting them online.
It’s exciting for us to see organizations like Shaw Rocket Fund take safety so seriously that they’re willing to offer further resources for Canadian content producers to put privacy and safety at the centre of their products. We’re honored to be partnering with Shaw Rocket Fund to kick-start a kids’ online safety program. The resources we create together will ensure that compliance is addressed, but also topics like how to engage parents, best practices for reporting negative behaviour, and what to think about when writing community guidelines. We hope that these resources will serve Canadian content producers for the benefit of Canadian children.
When we think about what privacy and safety look like for children in the next decade, events like this prove all the more important. It can’t be about just looking at what’s happening right now, AR and VR are quickly leading kids away from texting and typing to more voice chatting and a whole new set of challenges. This trend is only likely to gain momentum, and the partnerships we make with companies will help build a stronger industry, one that has privacy and safety right at the center. For those of you who attended the conference and participated in the panel, thank you! There’s much to be excited about with the future of technology, and we should all breathe a little easier to know that those driving those technologies are doing so with the safety of the child in mind.
