Parents, Tech Companies, and Bottom-Up Solutions to Online Safety
By: Taylor Barkley, Program Officer for Tech and Innovation at Stand Together.
Safety and privacy online, especially for minors, are essential. Parents and caregivers are cognizant of the risks and challenges of keeping their children safe online and are at the front lines of implementing bottom-up solutions to keep their families safe.
Technology has greatly improved the quality of life throughout human history. But innovation requires a culture that’s friendly toward innovation which means emphasizing the bottom-up approaches to problems.
FOSI is just one of a group of non-profits providing resources like these. For example, FOSI has developed the “How to Be a Good Digital Parent” toolkit and video series.
In addition to these organization’s efforts and helpful services, the companies themselves have a crucial role to play in providing bottom-up solutions.
At the FOSI conference, I had the privilege of moderating a panel of industry representatives on this very topic who discussed the opportunities and challenges of integrating safety into their online and connected products. Representatives from Google, Microsoft, Tencent America, The Meet Group, and ESET all shared ways their companies aim to help users stay safe online.
Some of the opportunities discussed were the ways AI and machine learning are being used to augment and enhance human security and safety experts at their companies, the increasing amount of industry collaboration on safety like the Technology Coalition, and how international regulations for real name identification impact innovation. The Meet Group, which owns and operates a variety of social and dating apps, has begun to use a facial recognition technology to verify identities and ages of users, for instance. ESET is at the front lines of threats and sharing them with others in the industry as well as consumer education via Safer Kids Online.
One of the primary challenges for these companies is ensuring that users, parents, and caregivers are even aware of the available safety features available. Research released at the conference reflected that there is an overwhelming array of tools which can prove daunting to parents and caregivers. However, it was clear during the panel that companies recognized the importance of their role in this effort. Microsoft for instance has built in a parental control prompt as part of the set-up process for the new Xbox systems. So instead of having to find those settings within a menu, the options are presented up front while the new system is being powered on for the first time.
Online safety is a team effort, involving every sector of society from the individual to multi-national corporations. Education and clarity go a long way in effectively keeping people, especially kids, safer online while empowering people to feel that they can embrace new technologies and innovation that make their lives easier.
