ICO supports projects to strengthen children’s privacy rights

One in five internet users in the UK is a child – but they are using a world that was not designed with them in mind.

The new ICO’s Children’s Code sets out how organisations should be designing online services centred on children’s privacy by September 2021.

Two of the latest projects to be supported by the ICO Sandbox should help ensure children can explore the internet safely.

Ian Hulme, Director of Regulatory Assurance said:

“Protecting children’s privacy online is a high priority for the ICO. Ultimately the regulatory sandbox aims to support innovators to improve confidence amongst children, young people and their parents and carers that their personal information is being properly protected when they are online.”

Projects

Yoti:

This ICO Sandbox partnership will offer age appropriate child-centred content moderation, together with privacy information and accessible parental consent options at a global scale.  Yoti’s identity platform, GoBubble’s child-content moderation SaaS (GoBubbleWrap) and others will:

• extend Yoti age estimation AI programme to under 13 year olds without ID documents, where their face is analysed and the image instantly deleted.
• use this technology to launch an age verified, content moderated esports membership platform for under 18s with parental consent options, including the use of age estimation for parental consent.

The partnership will offer customisable solutions to help other platforms and content communities meet regulatory requirements to protect children from unwanted intrusions, inappropriate content and minimise the risk of grooming - offered on a software as a service basis.

Seers:

Seers provides a privacy and consent management platform to help companies become compliant with data privacy regulations worldwide, including GDPR, PECR, CCPA & LGPD. Seers is working with ICO Sandbox team to enhance its Consent Management Platform (CMP) that provides child privacy consent management. The child privacy consent management platform enables children or parental/guardian consent and allows age verification before a child can gain access to website content to enable companies to comply with the new age appropriate code of practice to protect children's privacy online. It is imperative to protect children's privacy since one in five internet users are now children and Seers is offering this CMP to help ensure children’s ongoing safety when using the internet.

ends

If you need more information, please contact the ICO press office on 0303 123 9070.

Notes to Editors

1. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights law, upholding information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.
2. The ICO has specific responsibilities set out in the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA2018), the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR) and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR).

3. The establishment of a regulatory sandbox was a goal outlined in the ICO’s Technology Strategy 2018-21.
4. The ICO Sandbox is a free service, supporting organisations using personal data to develop innovative products and services.
5. The ICO introduced the beta ICO Sandbox in 2019 and ten organisations have so far taken part. You can read the complete reports so far here.
6. The ICO Children’s Code
7. To report a concern to the ICO go to ico.org.uk/concerns.