October 10 2024 GM
From TCU Wiki
The Social Networking Glitter Meetup
| Glitter Meetups |
- Date: Thursday, October 10
- Time: 9am EDT / 1pm UTC
- Facilitator: Mardiya
- Where: On TCU Mattermost "IF Square" Channel.
- Don't have an account to the TCU Mattermost? you can request one following the directions here.
The Social Networking Glitter Meetup is a space to connect with others in the community. Join us to talk about whatever you want: a project that you are working on, an event that caught your attention, general questions about the experience of working in the digital rights field, your insights on the latest big tech nonsense, and even your vacations. We will be happy to hear from you!
What is Glitter Meetup?
Glitter Meetup is the weekly town hall of the digital rights and Internet Freedom community at the IF Square on the TCU Mattermost, at 9am EDT / 1pm UTC. It is a text-based chat where digital rights defenders can share regional and project updates, expertise, ask questions, and connect with others from all over the world! Do you need an invite? Learn how to get one here.
Notes
- 5Rights is an International NGO upholding children's human rights online: https://5rightsfoundation.com/ - at the moment we working on various things such as child-rights centric technical standards with IEEE, and direct advocacy work with games developers.
Can you give like a typical example of a child rights technical standard for a game?
- There are legal standards popping up in various jurisdictions in the form of Age-Appropriate Design Codes (we fed into the development of the UK and Californian ones) - but for an industry-led standard we led authorship on IEEE 2089 (Age Appropriate Digital Services Framework Based on the 5Rights Principles). This is a link to a review copy of that for any interested parties: https://5rightsfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2089-2021-with-disclaimer.pdf
What have been some of the advocacy needs for games?
- In terms of games, we look at the UN human rights of the child in terms of things like the right to play, the right to not have their privacy invaded (e.g. by data-hungry practices), the right to be free of commercial exploitation, and so on...
And have you found that these are things that are not always considered within game design?
- Unfortunately yes, there's still a lot of data exploitation out there. But we're just one party out of many trying to work to make it better! Age-appropriateness is a very context-specific thing but we like to always refer back to the UN rights of the child as a baseline. It requires any decisions made affecting children to consider child best interests at their core.
How do you know if a game design is child appropriate or not? Especially if we all just go buy similar games and own nintendo switches or a mobile game?
- Age assurance is a really tricky topic at the moment! We see things like AI have the potential to cause algorithmic discrimination, especially as regards things like facial recognition for age assurance. However, we do report on what we think the principles for responsible age assurance should look like in future - namely they should be proportionate to the risks and not just used willy-nilly to bar children off from parts of the internet they should have access to, like education and health resources.
- We unfortunately see a lot of proposed rules and regulations in various places to bar children from learning about topics such as colonial history and minority rights advocacy. While we're campaigning for children to be able to feel safer online, a lot of people don't realise that also means we're campaigning for their right to keep access to such resources.
It looks like the key is for it to be age appropriate. Its also quite interesting that you are doing this with game-developers though. Is there a specific reason for that?
- Yes, from our consultations with children we can see that gaming is a really big part of digital life for so many of them right now, so we want to ensure they're not being unduly exploited while they play.
