'Safety by Design' Key to Online Safety, Experts Say
Safety by design is the core element to ensuring kids remain safe online while also protecting their privacy and rights, a Public Knowledge paper argues (see 2509050046). More research is needed concerning tangible harms, panelists said during a discussion Monday about the paper.
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Corporations should be responsible for building “privacy and safety into their products by default," said Sara Collins, director of government affairs at Public Knowledge and the paper's co-author. “If you turn something on for people, they tend not to turn it off,” Collins added.
Sydney Saubestre, senior policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute, agreed that “safety and security by design should be built into all technology,” and “should not just be for kids.”
“There's no reason why people shouldn't have more control over what they see online,” she said. But “the devil's in the details with all of this,” and so more data and research about the effects and harms people are experiencing are needed to know how best to legislate.
The ability to “use things like differential privacy or tiered researcher access to really assess what the impacts are” is key, because it would get rid of the reliance on the synthetic data companies produce about themselves, Saubestre said. For privacy reasons, the data itself would also have to be de-identified, but it would be “longitudinal data where you can actually look at what these [privacy and safety] features are” and “track them over time,” she added.
Changes can't only be made from a product-design perspective because “social media platforms are not just driving our interactions as consumers with a product, they're changing our culture and our norms, and they're becoming part of our everyday existence,” said Pamela Wisniewski, director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. “We need to think about this more in terms of user-centric or interaction design” and understand that “simple decisions on a platform can drive behavior.”
Matt Lane, senior policy counsel at Fight for the Future, agreed with the paper in that “focusing on privacy [is] an easy way of solving or alleviating a lot of the problems we find online.” For example, “not collecting the data that is necessary to put people in these negative feedback loops” helps from a data minimization standpoint and a mental health standpoint.
However, he cautioned that age verification implicates privacy, security, speech and competition, and also can be expensive and ineffective. One should be wary of content restrictions, Lane added. It's easier to enforce user privacy controls, making that a more meaningful avenue to focus on, he said.