It’s Time for a Change: Rethinking Policies to Protect Children’s Rights in a Datafied World

Executive Summary

In this essay from the Centre's Kids & Technology series, Valerie Steeves argues that children's online policy has been built on a flawed binary that treats the networked world as a place of great commercial benefits and manageable individual risks. Under this model, policymakers free up corporate innovation while dealing piecemeal with harms as they arise, and the standard remedy is to enlist parents, teachers and platforms to surveil children in the name of keeping them safe. Data protection frameworks, first devised in the 1970s to govern computer data processing, rest on the assumption that privacy is preserved so long as individuals can decide whether to disclose information, which in practice gives corporations like Facebook and Instagram a free pass to collect and commodify young people's data through click-through consent.

Steeves inverts this picture, arguing that surveillance is not the solution to online harm but part of the problem: the commercial design of platforms and the data collection that drives it create ideal conditions for viral harassment. She marshals research showing that young people are resilient and use networked technology creatively, yet find online life exhausting under commercialized pressures to conform. In a 2013 survey of over 5,000 Canadian youth aged 11 to 17, 83 per cent said the companies owning the platforms should have no access to their posted data, rising to 95 per cent for online marketers.

She concludes that policy must be reoriented around children's human rights and dignity, giving young people genuine control over their information rather than centring data flows and corporate profit.