Lola McEvoy

Okay, I will make progress. On the live location element, which I have discussed, I am not sure that there is any advantage in children using that, unless it is a specifically regulated live location app where the parents have given consent for their child. I do not know whether chatting to strangers on games is suitable for children. Adding peers to a group and enjoying playing with them on games is fine, but there could be strangers from other countries, with no indication of their age. One child told me that he had found out, after about three weeks, that the person he had been playing with was a 50-year-old man on another continent. That man was probably mortified, as was the child, and they stopped playing together. Why are we leaving it up to them? That is such a high-risk strategy for those apps; we need to think about that. It is down to Parliament to decide what is safe for our children, and to enforce it. Asking platforms to mark their own homework and police themselves will undoubtedly lead to more children seeing inappropriate, harmful content and sharing it with others. I would like the Government to strengthen the children’s codes, and consider changing the onus from reactive safety measures that make apps safe for children, when we suspect they are children, to proactively making apps or platforms safe for all children in the first place, and creating adult-only apps that require strong age verification, because adults can consent to giving their data. A number of ways to protect children online are being debated, as I am sure we will hear this afternoon. I feel strongly that retrofitting apps once children have been exposed to harmful content or strangers, or have shared things they should not, is not the safest or most effective way to do this. A number of options around age verification are on the table, but I would like the Government to consider that being a child is tough and that children have a right to make mistakes. The issue is that those mistakes involve mass communications to peers and a permanent digital footprint, because someone has consented, aged 13, to give away their data. We need to see whether any child can consent to give away their data, and therefore whether apps that identify their audience as children should be allowed to keep data at all. Should children be in chatrooms with strangers across the world? Should children be allowed to share their live location with strangers or people they have accepted as contacts? Should children be allowed to view unregulated livestreams or addictive-by-design content? Those questions have been raised not only by children themselves but by parents and national advocacy charities and leaders in this space. There is a consensus that we have to take action on this issue, so let us make the most of it.