Last night I was up until 1am on my phone desperately trying to find out where to buy a peach print shower curtain I’d seen on someone’s Instagram.
What should I have been doing? Sleeping of course.
So when I read through tired eyes this morning that the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham wants to introduce a social media curfew for children I thought – yes please, and count me in too.
More details of the proposal, which is part of the government’s new Data Protection Act, will be revealed later this week, but the idea is that social media companies like Facebook won’t be able to send children notifications and alerts during school hours or past their bedtime – giving them a chance to focus on either learning or getting to sleep.
The plans also include other measures designed to protect young users such as stricter privacy settings, not revealing children’s GPS locations, and using less of their data – with fines for social media companies that don’t comply.
Baroness Beeban Kidron led a cross-party campaign to create the bill which aims to protect children’s rights online. ‘The principle behind the age-appropriate code is that a child is a child until they mature, until they are 18, not until they pick up the smart phone,’ she told The Daily Telegraph. ‘It is unacceptable to ask a child to tick a box at 13 and treat them as an adult.’
“It’s the duty of online services whether its Amazon or a newspaper to treat the child according to its status as a child. It’s not the responsibility of the child to adapt to the commercial needs of these companies.
“The second principle is that it’s the responsibility of services to adapt and provide. We have to get the digital world designed better for children. It needs to anticipate the presence of children in these spaces.”
How many sets of guidelines and laws will it take before we realise the damaging effects of staying switched on past our bedtimes?
Adults might not need such a strict code as the one proposed here, but it’s worth considering whether a social media curfew could be an opt-in service for those of us who don’t trust ourselves not to look at our phones past our bedtime – after all the Love Island memes will still be there in the morning.
P.S. I found the shower curtain at 01:33…
Via Grazia
