Submission to IAB-W3C Workshop

Protecting children’s right?

It is a simple fact that nobody has a right to do anything, political or god-given. That we agree between groups of people that things are acceptable is simply documented and passed on. In this modern age it is now increasingly rare for there to be any clear majority agreement to back those decisions, and in many cases only the will of the largest minority get accepted, which results in the majority continuing to push against these decisions.

Even when there is factual evidence to back a decision, one party or another will dispute the facts to try and make decisions fit their own fictional bias. Using some religious or political publication to support that view. Even where the laws of nature are very clearly defined, things like ‘creationism’ are still accepted as fact and pushed on children without any further discussion. That large numbers of individuals are subjected to indoctrination from the day they are born is well documented, yet that abuse is ‘protected in law’. Even down to the idea that females are subservient to males in many communities. Something that is as bad as the idea that anybody as a ‘right to kill’ for equally spurious reasoning today.

It is a simple fact that no child can be created without both the male and female elements that create a new embryo. That that embryo can today be created with other than ‘natural’ processes has to be accepted, but even where a third party has been involved¹, the basic building block is a pair of male and female DNA strings. My own belief is that a child should be entitled to know just where those two strings came from if only because it may flag up in the possible future genetic problems that medical research is identifying apparently daily. That this embryo is highly likely to be either male or female is also a simple fact, although there are some very rare genetic twists that place a few into a questionable category. At least the UK courts have now come down and support that as a basic fact², so the discussions on ‘gender reorientation’ can be debated in the correct framework. As to just where that discussion fits in schools is again subject to numerous biases that interweave with the question as to ‘What is suitable for a child to see?’.

That the internet is a complete and utter mess is another simple fact. It was never designed at all and while some elements are now well standardised and documented, the basic principles do lack some key rules. The idea that privacy is a ‘right’ is another area where there can be a number of conflicting views as to just what that entails. That financial transactions can be carried out without ANY record of where money has come from or gone to is simply a joke. That criminals use this to protect their identify when scamming or extorting is not ‘acceptable’ and perhaps a bigger problem than simply filtering material that children see. What is missing from the internet IS a means of proving who we are which can then be used to prevent things like emails pretending to be from us. It is proving who we are that is key to any system to filter content that is being transferred. Simply sticking a front door on ‘porn’ sites³ misses most of the sources of that material and I think that some people do have justification to claim it impacts THEIR use of the internet, but it does need some common sense in identifying just what material is being viewed.

There has been a lot of controversy in the UK about an ‘identity card⁴’, but at the end of the day, if somebody exists then they have an identity that they should be able to prove, and while passports are now a luxury item, some sort of card against which facts can be stored, such as age, is simply a logical step. That children will not have a driving licence also becomes a problem where a growing number of adults can not afford one anyway, and if public transport or automated cars become more affordable, many more adults will no longer need to bother to learn. That anybody working in the UK today needs a National Insurance number⁵ is a fact, and while not commonly used for identification, does set a precedent as to an individual identification.

The data protection act was intended to protect an individuals privacy, and while it is now easy to establish just what information a third party has attached to ones ‘identity’, it misses out on providing a way to securely provide information to a third party that they need to know. Such as ones age and perhaps sex! Personally I use my github account⁶ as a my ID card and my history back to SourceForge days gives more than enough detail without scraping all of the websites I visit. Nobody has a ‘legitimate interest’ in that and ‘no non-essential cookies’ should be the default option, rather than hiding ‘legitimate interest’ switches deep in the small print! A tighter definition of just what are ‘essential cookies’ would perhaps help as well, with complaints about plans to drop third-party cookies somewhat questionable⁷. That there are actions that do need some means of being tracked is an operational requirement, for which cookies are the current mechanism, but an alternate mechanism that could also perhaps include key identification elements such as age and sex seems a logical step.

That I have an interest in just what is available on-line is partly driven by the pressures I and others have received in relation to a few websites I have been involved with. One that is now only partially available in the Internet Archive is the NovelActivist⁸ site of Ray Harris, which had a lot of interesting articles, but included a section on historic material called ‘The naked child in art⁹’. Nudity is not pornography, and as children develop they should learn about their body and it’s beauty. None of the images on that site were likely to be covered by the latest ‘adult content’ rules and are still on display in public forums all around the world. A second site which has been hounded offline is Pigtails In Paint¹⁰, which has even been stripped from the Internet Archive yet it only displayed some of those same images! Just who has the right to decide what is and what is not allowed on-line? Having at one point recovered the Pigtails in Paint site, and even got it removed from a block by Google and Bing, the many hundreds of articles in support of girls growing up in a male dominated world were once again available, so why was that site subject to such vicious attack when it WAS a safe domain that school children could use as a resource without fear of seeing unsuitable content? One major problem with it and NovelActivist before it was the manor in which the likes of Google and other search engines linked ‘adult content’ with most searches that should just have produced material relating to activities such as virtuoso girl musicians or young actresses in films. At one time switching on ‘safe browsing’ kill more safe content than adult material simply because of the way results were created. Today even the ‘AI’ based searches seem to mess up when ‘nudity’ is part of that equation.

Another site that I currently host covers the works of Graham Ovenden¹¹ who, yes, is a convicted sex offender. That some of his work from the 1980’s features naked or scantily dressed girls simply reflects what was acceptable at the time, and even Princess Diana commissioned him to produce a work for the Birthright Trust¹². That ALL of his work was taken down by public galleries is just crass since the vast majority of his work this century had been landscapes. Those have now been restored to the public record, but there is still criticism of his sites simply because of his tag of a sex offender, when the majority of the material he was convicted off was subsequently given a clean bill of health and returned to him by the court. The law is simple, only a court can rule on what is and what is not acceptable material and the police’s use of ‘AI’ to decide what is not can ONLY be used to provide evidence to the court in relation to a prosecution. That in some parts of the world today, judges are no longer respected as impartial protectors of the law is not helping in establishing a set of rules as to just how we determine what is ‘suitable for children to view’. The Internet Watch Foundation used to be our go to place re material which was controversial, but today their only interest is material that has already been published and has a working URL¹³. They no longer help with validating if an historic image is now a problem.

That a large part of what is called the deep web is viewed as separate from the ‘normal’ web misses the point that as long as there is no gateway blocking access, any internet address can be viewed by any suitable browser. That today most access points have some sort of gateway restricting that access needs to be better explained and understood. The fibre broadband here was down for a few days and I was reliant on using the mobile phone as a hotspot, but some sites that I could access via the land-line did not appear over the hotspot, and torrents, which I use to download software updates and material from the Internet Archive, did not work. Censorship like that does have some place, but needs to be properly regulated and better disclosed? The mobile service has the option to restore some of the filtered sites, but when it takes days to action … when one is using it only as a backup anyway.

What IS missing is the sort of censorship that we have in relation to films¹⁴, but expanded to cover all forms of content. Personally I don’t bother with ‘pornography’, or ‘gambling’, so a switch to remove that type of content would be nice. The volume of gambling adverts on TV gets annoying at times and is definitely something that should be stripped from a child safe feed. For TV programs today I normally just record them and strip the adverts before settling in to watch. The browsers ad-blocker does as good a job with on-line adverts although I tend to avoid sites that do include advertising anyway. ‘Social Media’ is not somewhere I frequent although the drive to create that environment on github does not help with that. I avoid the ‘home page’ which is full of irrelevant material and I stick with those projects that I am using or working on.

The bigger picture however is a much more troubling thing. Should we even be wasting time on ‘protecting children from the internet’ when so many of them are being needlessly killed in the name of some right or another. We will sidestep the simple question on just who has the right to bring those children into the world. That decision is one that has a place in the discussion but once a life has been created then at the end of the day that life SHOULD have a right to exist without interference from any other individual. Nobody has a ‘right’ to remove that life from the world. They may think they have justification to mitigate taking life, but that is purely their own blinkered view. Nothing can justify the unnatural death that is taking place in the world today. Much is made of ‘terrorist acts’ then justifying further deaths, but how many of those ‘terrorist acts’ are simply political acts caused because of the supposed rights of others. We need to engage and cooperate to bring an end to conflict, and that is not going to happen if one party is cut out of the conversation by the ‘expedient’ of calling them ‘terrorists’. Their actions may well be unacceptable, but is the retaliation then any more acceptable. The idea of ‘turning the other cheek‘ included in many religious texts seems to go out of the window when it should be front and centre in any discussion.

Much of the work to implement a level playing field is happening in cooperation on various forums. The likes of github while having been hijacked by commercial interest¹⁵ has managed to keep information open and easily accessible. Some of the projects that use the forum to host their code base are perhaps not quite so open and having just spent several months pulling hair out trying to wrangle my own web services under control I might disagree that many projects are actually ‘improving’. They are being changed to ‘modern practices’, but I do not see that there is any improvement resulting from that change. The fundamental change that needs to happen is an even more open framework in every aspect of the world today. Privacy only has a place when you have something to hide, and opening up the internet to better identity just who is responsible for content is essential to make a safe playing field. Be that filtering adult content from younger users, or identifying the sources of any unacceptable material and the new UK online rules are not helping¹⁶. If there is a money trail, then it should also include a path that can be used to restore funds taken fraudulently, but the activity that resulted in the fraud should also be easier to identify. Starting with filtering traffic intended for children is what is being discussed, but it is the big picture that needs to be included in that discussion.

Today while we try to enforce new ‘pay-walls’ even if they are free, the whole system has too many holes for that to function. I have ‘browsec’ available on my firefox browser which gets switched on when needed and is freely available to anybody and proposals to ban VPN are just another joke¹⁷.. That children may well be using accounts that their parents have set up and which are flagged as ‘over 18’ already is another hole. So are any of the current ‘rules’ any use at all? The better place to start is perhaps directly monitoring the content and flagging material that is classified as questionably. I include hate speech in message streams in that since this is one of the main starting points of pressure on children, but not only children. Yes there will be those that complain that this affects their ‘right to free speech’, but there has to be a mechanism that monitor this sort of traffic and can then tackle any unacceptable activity. In the good old days, moderators saw all traffic and blocked users who failed to respect other users. That traffic today is far too high perhaps for all that to be done by humans presents a case for ‘AI’, but at the end of the day humans need to be in control. In any case I would not concider any of these systems more than Advance Patern Matching until they are able to ask WHY a question is being passed. That someone is searching on something like suicide needs intelligence to identify why. The traffic process need to be able to direct problem activity to an appropriate human monitored service, and this should be over and above any argument about ‘privacy’. That this monitoring could be parents in the case of their children would go some way to help where a child is using that adults on-line account. In the school environment, a local front end rather than the free for all global services would allow locally managed material and monitoring via local bodies.

Finally, nobody has a right to bully, be that in the playground or on the world stage. Claiming that it is only being done in self defence is simply no excuse, and trying to hide the results is unacceptable. That the internet offers a chance to record the truth is the whole point of freedom and bullies who use their alleged superiority to block the truth is equally unacceptable. Cooperation in agreeing what is the true situation is essential and should supersede ANY claim to spurious rights to prevent cooperation. We all have the right to live without interference from anybody!