Category: Online Safety

‘Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future’

Posted on by The Information Badger in Change, Ethics & Regulation, Online Safety, social media, Technology

Some days you see something that tugs at your heart strings and makes you sad. One such day recently was when the Badger walked the leafy lanes where he played as a child.  Two vans and three burly men with chain saws were cutting down two magnificent horse-chestnut trees  – trees that the Badger and his childhood friends used to not only play beneath, but also climb to find the best conkers! The trees are still healthy, but they are being felled to make way for a new housing development. The sadness at seeing one of his favourite childhood haunts being dismembered was real.  It was a reminder that change is inevitable, that progress isn’t always for the good, and that the Badger’s childhood was very different to that of most children today.

Since the time the young Badger climbed these conker trees, much of the world has become healthier, better educated, and wealthier. The internet, computing, communication, and social media revolution has changed both social norms and the nature of childhood. As children, the Badger’s generation routinely climbed trees without adult supervision, ropes, or protective equipment, rode bicycles without wearing a helmet, and interacted with every type of creature in nature on an almost daily basis. We took the scrapes, bumps, and bruises that came with this freedom in our stride.  Our freedom was real. We were naturally innovative and imaginative when playing games with playmates, and we problem-solved and learned from each other without thinking about it.   

Childhood today is more cosseted, more organised, more risk averse when it comes to unsupervised outdoor play, and it is shaped and heavily influenced by modern tech and social media. The Badger thinks childhood is actually more dangerous today! Why? Well, whereas there was no online world when the Badger was a child, today it is a major aspect of a child’s life, as an OFCOM report illustrates.  This exposes them to cyberspace threats that simply didn’t exist when the Badger climbed conker trees and the tech world that we know today was science fiction.  Accordingly, the Badger believes the Online Safety Bill , currently in its final stages in the UK Parliament, is a good thing and long overdue.

The values of our country are fundamentally family values, ones which protect children and the vulnerable from those that would do them harm. These were the values when the Badger was a child, and it should still be that way in today’s online world. Our values and our way of life are also determined by us, and not by the huge digital tech corporations that dominate today’s world. John F. Kennedy said, ‘ Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future’. The UK’s Online Safety Bill is thus doing a good thing; it’s protecting the world’s most valuable resource…

Your face, your voice, AI, and human rights…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI & Robotics, Automation, Education, Ethics & Regulation, Information Technology, Legal matters, Online Safety, Privacy and Surveillance, social media

In the gap between completing his undergraduate degree and starting post-graduate study, the Badger took a temporary job as an assistant in a dockyard laboratory performing marine metallurgical failure investigations and associated corrosion research. It was a great few months which enabled the application of what he learned during his undergraduate degree to real world events. Those few months are the reason why, for example, the Badger has a particular interest today in the findings of the investigation into the Titan deep-sea submersible failure. The dockyard lab staff were experts with colourful personalities and diverse opinions on a wide range of topics. Engaging in wide-ranging discussions with them, especially at lunchtime in the canteen, was enlightening, thought-provoking, and has been the source of fond memories lasting for years.

One particular memory is of one senior expert, highly respected but always cantankerous and quarrelsome, refusing to be photographed sitting at their electron microscope for a newspaper feature about the laboratory. They didn’t want their image captured and used because, they claimed, it was part of ‘who they were as an individual’ and therefore it was part of their human rights to own and control its use. The lab boss saw things differently, and for days there was a lot of philosophical discussion amongst staff about the expert’s position. The newspaper feature ultimately used a photo of the electron microscope by itself.

The current strike by Hollywood actors, due in part to proposals relating to AI and the use of an actor’s image and voice, brought the memory of the lab expert’s stance regarding their image to the fore. In those days, the law was more straightforward because the internet, social media, personal computers, smart phones, and artificial intelligence didn’t exist. In today’s world, however, images of a person and their voice are routinely captured, shared, and manipulated, often for commercial gain without an individual’s real awareness. The law has, of course, developed – all be it slowly – since the expert’s days at the lab, but the surge in AI in its various guises over the last year seems to illustrate that the gap between legal/regulatory controls and the digital world continues to widen.    

Today, and with advancing AI, an image of you or snippet of your voice can be manipulated for any purpose, good or evil. Whilst there’s some teaching of online safety at school, is it enough? Does it sufficiently raise awareness about protecting ‘your image and your voice which are both key attributes that characterise who you are as a person’? Did the dockyard lab expert have a point, all those years ago, in asserting that it was part of their human rights to own and control their image? The Badger doesn’t have the answers, but he senses that AI and human-rights will inevitably be a fertile ground for campaigners, legislators, and regulators for many decades to come…

The freedom to access your money and use it as you wish is being diminished…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Banking, Online Safety, Online Services, Security

UK banks blocking individuals’ accounts without explanation has garnered media interest recently, see here for example. Your money is yours as long as you can access it and have the freedom to use it for your needs and desires, but a recent experience which caused the Badger inconvenience and frustration shows that this premise continues to erode.

A builder working on the Badger’s home took an hour out to visit their bank’s nearest branch to withdraw ~£1600 cash. They returned angry and without their cash. At the branch they were interrogated about what the cash withdrawal was to be used for. The builder explained it was to pay his friend for parts from a classic car being cannibalised for spares. The parts were to be used on his own classic car being restored as a hobby in his garage. The bank refused the withdrawal citing ‘security’ and the absence of any invoice. Sharp words were exchanged, with the builder asserting that it was his money, it was none of the bank’s business what he wanted it for, and that their interrogation amounted to an invasion of his privacy. The bank was unwavering, and the builder left without his cash.

The following day a self-employed groundworker laid and connected a new drain for the Badger. The agreed price (<£1000) for the work was based on payment of their invoice using online banking within two days of the work being completed to the Badger’s satisfaction. Payment was thus straightforward and quick, wasn’t it? No. It took two hours. Because the groundworker banked with Metro Bank, the Badger’s bank’s IT systems assumed they were potentially a scammer! A text message notified the Badger to call his bank’s Payment Fraud team if he wanted the payment to proceed.

On calling, the Badger was interrogated about the payee, the payment, the work the payee had done, and much more. It felt as if the Badger wasn’t being listened to, and that the call handler’s primary focus was capturing evidence that the bank fulfilled its money laundering and funding of terrorism obligations. The lengthy call ended when the Badger was told the payment would stay blocked until he called the Payment Fraud Team again after speaking to the groundworker to confirm they existed and were the payee! To put it mildly, the Badger was livid. Twenty minutes later the Badger called the Payment Fraud Team again, went through exactly the same lengthy questioning with a different call handler, but this time he managed to get the payment unblocked.

With local bank branches a rarity in the UK, online banking the norm, and society increasingly cashless, the freedom to access and use your money as you wish is, for most people, continually being diminished. But that’s not a surprise, because history shows the banks always seem to get away with whatever they want…

Should ‘information’ be thought of as a poison?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Education, Information Technology, Learning, Life, Online Safety, Press & Media

A couple of weeks ago, BBC News unveiled BBC Verify, a new brand to counter disinformation and reinforce audience trust by showing how its journalists check the veracity of what’s reported. Inevitably, Verify has been frequently featured in the broadcaster’s radio and television news programmes since the announcement. Surveys (like the one here, for example) show there’s been a significant drop in trust in the UK news media over the last five years. With BBC News having suffered one of the biggest drops, it’ll be interesting to see if Verify helps to stem their downward trend.

The advent of BBC Verify, plus recent social media and online clamour surrounding a number of human tragedies, triggered childhood memories of the Badger’s father reading his newspaper at the breakfast table. He would regularly say ‘Don’t believe everything you read in newspapers, lad. Most of the information is just poison’. In today’s world we access and consume news and information in a very different way, primarily via our televisions and internet enabled laptops, tablets, and smartphones on a 24 by 7 basis. This fatherly advice, however, seems even more relevant than ever today. These days, being sceptical about the content  you consume and wondering if it contains something poisonous likely to harm you, is definitely no bad thing.

In biochemistry, a poison is a natural or synthetic substance that causes damage to living tissue and has a harmful or fatal effect on our body. The act of poisoning involves a cause (the poison), a subject (the entity being poisoned), an effect (symptoms), and a consequence (debilitation or death). Awareness that things like insect and snake bites, drugs, dodgy food, pesticides, radiation, and biological/chemical agents can poison us is good, but our awareness that ‘information’ can poison our minds and change behaviour is still too low, especially in youngsters whose lives are dominated by social media and the virtual world. It’s no surprise that evidence for harm to young people’s mental health through their use of social media continues to grow.

The Badger’s found himself wondering if there’s merit in thinking of ‘information’ as a poison giving the synergy with the act of poisoning noted above. Just like a medical drug, ‘information’ consumed in an appropriate context from a trusted source can do much good. But also like a drug, ‘information’ in high quantity glibly absorbed and accepted from anywhere can cause an individual great harm. Categorizing ‘information’ as a poison might, perhaps, simplify and embed greater understanding of its potential impact on wellbeing, especially in youngsters.

The Badger tested this musing with his teenage nephew, only to be told that age had clearly affected his mental faculties! If that’s true, then it’s down to the ‘information poison’ he’s consumed over the years and the fact that there’s no real antidote in sight…

Toddlers and online safety…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Ethics & Regulation, Online Safety, Online Services, social media, Technology

Gone are the days when toddlers just played with toy cars, trains, books, and physical building blocks, and watched children’s television before bedtime. They learn quickly from those around them, so it’s hardly surprising that they want to play with mobile phones, tablets, and laptops when their parents and grandparents are using them routinely as part of day-to-day life. The Badger’s toddler grandson, for example, already runs around with an old pocket calculator to his ear mimicking a mobile phone, adeptly swipes through the photo gallery on the Badger’s smartphone, and also selects and plays videos on the ‘Hey Duggee’ YouTube channel on a tablet.

Last weekend, as his grandson sat watching ‘Hey Duggee’ on an iPad, the Badger read OFCOM’s ‘Children and parents: media and attitudes report 2022’ .  It’s full of interesting information and hard numbers about how children between the ages of 3 and 17 use the internet and social media. It brings home the fact that the online world is central to children’s lives from a very early age. That’s both a positive thing and a negative, with the negatives falling mainly under the umbrella of the following neat words in an antipodean news article:

‘We’re living through the wild west of the internet. In Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and the rest, we have a new kind of critical infrastructure, not unlike the railroads and telephone lines of the mid-1800s…….we’ve become rapidly dependent on this new critical infrastructure, which has in many ways transformed the world for the better, but we’ve done it before we figured out how to make it safe’.

Responsible parents and grandparents want their offspring to benefit from the positives of the online world from an early age, provided they can be confident in online safety. Unfortunately, confidence isn’t high.  With just under half of children in the UK aged 12 having at least one social media account in 2019, and apparently more PR than substantive improvements in the aftermath of  Molly Russell’s 2022 inquest, the Badger feels that the case for regulation is overwhelming, and that it’s the only way to improve confidence that his grandson will be safe online. 

But here’s the rub. The UK’s Online Safety Bill, here, has been plodding through Parliament since 2019 and looks unlikely to become law before 2024. In the modern world of electronic documents, email, instant messaging, and content sharing, it’s shameful that it takes years to produce legislation that was really needed at least a decade ago.  Why is it taking so long? Is it because politicians are themselves part of the new wild west by over-using the internet and social media for their own ends? Who knows, but with AI set to revolutionise every type of content accessible online, the probability that the Badger’s grandson will enjoy a tamed online wild west seems to be trending towards vanishingly small.