Why We Need Devices for Children

Type: Blog Post

Date: 16th June

Yesterday's announcement from the nation's favourite, Kier Starmer, of a social media ban for under-16s might have seemed like common-sense at last. However, the ban comes with a host of privacy, censorship, and overreach concerns for adults, while kids are instead pushed to unregulated services (if they don't easily find a work-around for the ban). Phones for kids are an attractive solution to both of these problems: age checks happen at point-of-sale rather than tying our online and offline identities together, while restrictions apply beyond just a handful of popular platforms.

With TikTok leading the way, over the past decade, social media platforms have been tweaking their platforms to make them more addictive. As is common for digital platforms, initially they offer high-value services for both users and advertisers, leading to rapid adoption from both. After they gain dominance, growth stops, and so these businesses extract the value from services to increase revenues with their existing customers. So, addictive design is the user's gift from the digital advertising business model. The most successful platforms are then those with strong network effects — Uber, Facebook, Instagram — keeping users locked in despite lower-value service. Despite more and more ads, despite the algorithm demanding more and more of your time, you are still on the platform because everyone else is too.

With the number of court cases against addictive design's harmful impact on kids rising , now seems like the perfect time for government to do something. However, an outright ban risks pushing kids into unfamiliar spaces with fewer child-focused design options . Alternatively, children lose access to their controlled social media account, but secretly gain access to an adult account instead. Either way, parents end up losing control over what their child does online.

Instead of banning just a few online services, through age checks which can be circumvented using your device's VPN, devices designed specifically for children should be promoted by government. With age restrictions built-in client-side, work-arounds will be much more difficult, while harmful content could be filtered no matter the service you are using. Parental control will also be enabled by default, rather than only by the most tech-savvy parents. Only 35-51% of parents currently make use of such controls .

Purchasing unrestricted devices could require showing ID, providing a more robust system for limiting underage access to harmful online content. With a separate class of devices for children, parents could be educated about the concerns for children's use of unrestricted devices at point-of-sale, too. Crucially, this avoids adults having to tie their online and offline identities, since restrictions are all implemented through the device. Bottom-up age restriction then avoids overreach from governments wanting to investigate or censor your online activities.

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