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Children’s rights in the digital environment

By the European Council for Digital Good

In the following document, the 15 permanent members of the European Council for Digital Good (EuCDG), aged between 13 and 21 years, put forward their views on some of the important rights children should be able to enjoy all over the world, how digital technology impacts these rights, and what could be done to better protect children in today’s media landscape. These ideas draw on a 2018 consultation involving young people from 35 countries to define and rank the biggest challenges they encounter in the digital world. These challenges constitute the EuCDG’s 2020 Agenda for a Smarter Internet for Kids . Specific goals, targets and means to respond to the challenges were developed with 30 or so Italian youth at Safer Internet Day celebration events in Milan in February 2019. These challenges on the EuCDG’s 2020 agenda are intrinsically linked to children’s rights defined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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Introduction to ‘kids have your say’ project

Goal: Trigger authentic participation of young people in countries in several regions of the world to inform parents, decision makers, industry… and children and young people worldwide

The internet offers young people invaluable opportunities to access more data, process more information and meet more people than ever before. As their digital footprint expands, they are also open to more risks, including social exploitation in one form or another. This can be exploitation by peers, for example through bullying or the unwanted sharing of images, or online, as in grooming and radicalization  by people they interact with online. Their data, too, can easily become a commodity for marketing and other purposes. The list is long, and growing almost exponentially with the advent of new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, artificial reality, Internet of Toys and Things and the challenges they encounter in the ever-more-realistic world of online gaming.

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Teens stress authenticity at first US ‘kids have your say’ meeting

On September 19, 2018 a group of teens, affiliated with Digital Tag2, gathered in East Palo Alto, CA to talk about what they want the internet to look like.The teens were initially handed a form to write-down their top issues and concerns but they quickly abandoned that approach and, instead, just talked about their concerns.

What emerged was the impression that the internet and mobile technology was working for them. They were getting a great deal out of being online. But, as you might expect, not all was rosy. The teens had their complaints about both institutional issues and behavioral issues from fellow netizens.

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