Children’s rights and online age assurance systems: the way forward

Livingstone, Sonia ORCID: 0000-0002-3248-9862, Nair, Abhilash, Stoilova, Mariya ORCID: 0000-0001-9601-7146, van der Hof, Simone and Caglar, Cansu (2024) Children’s rights and online age assurance systems: the way forward. International Journal of Children's Rights, 32 (3). 721 - 747. ISSN 0927-5568

Text (chil-article-p721_009) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (846kB)

• Author

Abstract

Age assurance is a way to prevent children accessing content, products or services that are potentially harmful to them, ranging from gambling services or alcohol or tobacco or, increasingly, certain products and services online. Now that children’s lives are mediated by digital technologies, policymakers are deliberating over the legal, technical and practical challenges. These have been little examined from the perspective of children’s rights. By combining legal and social research methods, this article examines the legal requirements for age assurance in Europe, assesses compliance by companies and reveals the consequences for family life. In law and practice, we show that age assurance is often ineffective in protecting children from online risk of harm. Further, as currently implemented it risks children’s other rights – to non-discrimination, privacy, to be heard, and their civil rights and freedoms, and remedy. We identify promising directions for the use of age assurance in child online protection, focusing on European policy, regulators and civil society actors.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://brill.com/view/journals/chil/chil-overview...
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman K Law > K Law (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2024 14:36
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2024 09:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122731

Actions (login required)

View Item