IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021 - 43

inappropriate responsibilities for safety and
data privacy for young users before they are
capable of accepting these responsibilities,
and/or their guardians who are often equally
ill equipped and are already busy.26 For example,
many T&Cs enshrine " opt-out " requirements
for basic privacy and safety features
that place the responsibility with guardians
or children to actively " opt-out. " Cookie policies
that require a parent or indeed a child to
actively opt-out of data collection or targeted
advertising, for example, violates regulations
that prohibit data collection and advertising
to under-13 or under-16 year olds. But cookies
policies are not alone in these violations,
with many social media platforms requiring
children or parents to turn OFF risky
features, such as geolocation or friend recommendations.
It cannot be solely up to
guardians nor children to create a legal,
safe user experience; these responsibilities
must instead rest with service and product
providers.27
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Getting T&Cs right for young people is a
moral, legal, and business imperative. It requires
direct stakeholders, such as companies offering
services and their affiliates, to consider the context
of their end-users as having particular
needs, and " by design " meet those expectations
as requirements.
Moral Imperative
There is a moral imperative to realize children's
rights in the digital world. Young people's
rights, codified in the Convention on the Rights
of the Child,28 apply to young people wherever
they " are " and wherever they " go " including digital
environments. Too often these are overlooked
in the way we build and govern the
digital world, including T&Cs. Additionally,
intrinsic linkages between the end-user's socialcyber-physical
circumstances are often not
addressed, if considered at all, and the implications
may be far-reaching.
This can have catastrophic effects from
enabling online harms (e.g., where the terms of
service allow the profiles of under 18 year olds
July/August 2021
to be recommended or introduced to adult
strangers29), potential offline harms (e.g., the
availability of a young person's physical geospatial
coordinates viewable in an online service30),
the spread of misinformation (e.g., where Community
Standards allow mis/disinformation to
be published and often promoted in young people's
feeds by algorithms and big data analytics31)
and inappropriate collection and sharing
of children's personal data (e.g., where the privacy
policies fail to recognize that data from
under 18 year olds is afforded special protections,
not to mention the sharing to partner and
parent organizations). Improved T&Cs can
ensure that digital service and products realize,
rather than violate, young people's rights.
Legal Imperative
In the legal and policy domain, regulators are
progressively acknowledging the importance of
Published Standards for young people. For
example, the UK's Age Appropriate Design
Code32 makes it a requirement for any information
society service likely to be accessed by children-a
very expansive target in itself-to
present T&Cs in ways that are:
" clear and accessible... In every case you
should provide information that is accurate
and does not promise protections or
standards that are not routinely upheld. This
should help children or their parents make
properly informed decisions about whether
to provide the information required to
access or sign up to your service in the first
place, and to continue to use it. Ifyou
believe thatyou need to draftyour terms and
conditions in a certain way in order to make
them legally robust, then you can provide
child-friendly explanations to sit alongside
the legal drafting. "
Importantly, it should be stipulated that the
Convention on the Rights of the Child is the
most ratified human rights treaty in the world.
Globally, nation states are in agreement that the
rights of children must be upheld. The recently
released draft of the UN Committee on the Rights
of the Child's General Comment on Children's
Rights in relation to the Digital Environment
requires all ratified states to:
" require businesses that impact on
children's rights in relation to the digital
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021

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