New program to investigate child safety and privacy online

Children's online safety and privacy will be the focus of a new three-year research program by a collaboration of Australian and US-based researchers.

The University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab has received $1.1 million in philanthropic research funding to undertake the program, led by child safety and technology domain expert Dr Kate Sim.

Associate Professor Julia Powles, Director of the UWA Tech & Policy Lab, said Dr Sim brought a unique combination of expertise from academia, community organisations and industry practice on child sexual abuse and exploitation, tech-facilitated sexual violence and technology policy.

Most recently, Dr Sim worked at Google where she oversaw product policy on grooming, sextortion and non-consensual intimate imagery. She holds a PhD and MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute, and a BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University.

The program will research the range of online harms young people face, and the effective harm reduction strategies required, ensuring the protection of children’s rights and dignity from surveillance and policing.

“The whole intersection of security, safety and privacy for kids online is really complicated and so we want to look at how we place children at the centre of that conversation,” Associate Professor Powles said. “Children are often invoked in the conversation, but rarely present.”

The program will bring evidence-driven, rights-based review to the technological solutions that increasingly dominate discussions of child safety.

Dr Sim said that the assumed good intent of child-focused policy-making tended to be accompanied by a reduction of rigour and scrutiny.

“There is a tendency on the part of regulators, industry and civil society to separate privacy and safety when it comes to young people’s experiences online,” she said. “But these two issues are not at odds – they’re very much connected.

“So how do we centre that in our approach? There are different roles that individuals, groups and institutions can play. The aim of this program to be rigorous and precise in imagining what those responsibilities are, so that young people are not only safeguarded, but also encouraged to exercise their agency and build resilience.”

Associate Professor Powles said one of the most powerful influences in the online environment was advertising, where young people often encountered unwanted material.

“It’s a whole area that has somehow been outside the scope of regulatory attention,” she said.

“Training attention on these major, structural issues is what our program is set up to do.”