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Maybe I'll start asking the panel, can each of you, just based on what you've heard there,
just kind of give us the top line thoughts in terms of what youíve heard there, what
these young people are saying and how therefore we can link it to what you feel UKCCIS, the
UK Council for Child Internet Safety, can do to better serve the needs of children and
young people online.
I'll start with you, Will, because you had a head start - you've seen that already.
OK, but I didn't know that question. But I think the young people were saying
That's why I'm here, Will, to ask difficult questions.
Yeah, the young people are saying that it's all... it's a part of everyday life. It's
as a routine. It's in the morning break - that's the first time they use it. It's
late at night and you can just see how immersed they are in their whole environment. So it's
an everyday part of their life that they use to a great extent. But what was interesting
was when they were talking about what were the things that worried them and you know
the issues were around privacy and addiction, over-use to the point where it impacts on
other areas of their lives. The group of young people there were sort of 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds
and we were particularly focussing on that age group when we asking those questions.
Those were the issues that bubbled up in their minds. And they were also saying well what
advice they had and they were saying they had had people come, some had had people come
and talk to them, which is great, but they wanted more in terms of practical advice of
what skills to be able to navigate this environment safely. So, I mean, if I'm interpreting what
that means in terms of what the work of UKCCIS is doing, is about ensuring that every child
going through school is equipped with the skills they need to navigate this environment
to keep themselves safe, their peers safe and to keep being able to interact with the
wider community safely.
Thank you. Matt?
I mean, listening to what the young people are saying, I think it was interesting that
some of them said they'd had educational awareness in school and some of them said
they'd not had anything. And that concerns me. And the premise of this panel is, you
know, what could UKCISS do better or differently to protect young people. And I still don't
think there's enough being done to get out into schools and talk to children and young
people. CEOP and Childnet and others have done a good job. Microsoft, Visa, O2 and others
have worked. We've seen, Microsoft, I think 32,000 young people in the last year with
our volunteers going out and training children. And other people from other companies have
seen many more. But there are still a lot more. And I do believe that one of the things
UKCISS should be doing is coordinating industry volunteering, getting people to step in and
go into schools. Particularly, what we find valuable, is younger people than me at Microsoft
and MSN going in and talking to people in schools. So that there are actually young
people that they listen to and say, you know, I have more respect for them, I will listen
to them perhaps than a teacher or parent or older person typically. Thatís one thing.
And the other thing, Tanya, that I thought was very interesting is thinking about the
future and about sort of 3D, and about interactive and about touchscreen, and about visual communication.
Bill was kind enough right at the outset to say actually thatís a fact now. You know,
Microsoft Kinect is actually the fastest selling consumer device - it's in the Guinness Book
of Records. It is a, you know, one way that people are connecting to gaming devices and
we will already going to start seeing that getting into PCs and other devices so it will
be, you know, a visual representation of your body moving the screen and er, you know, er
operating the computer or the software or whatever. We need to think more about what
that means for safety. We've got quite a lot of safety in the X-box but, you know,
I'm thinking about that very much for myself. You know, Microsoft is hoping to complete
the purchase of Skype, for example, and moving very much in that way. So, you know, we take
our responsibilities very seriously. I take them seriously.
I'll just give you, if I may, Tanya, just a very quick anecdote. Only very recently
- my kids Skype a lot - and in fact you know my youngest was watching something on
the iPlayer, some kids TV in the room next to where my office is, and he called out to
me - he's six by the way - and he called out "Dad, you need to come quickly". And
when you're a parent, you kind of know the difference between "Dad, I want some help"
or "I want a drink" and "Dad, it's serious, something's happening!" And I ran down the
corridor and someone had come on Skype, just come straight into his bedroom effectively,
he had clicked on it and nothing terrible happened but they made a rude face at him
and said something offensive, scared the living daylights out of him. And I, you know, as
a parent but also someone who works in the internet industry, reckons they know an awful
lot about this, suddenly realised I hadn't set the safety properly on Skype. So I do
think it comes down to parents, all parents to think about "Where are the safety tools?"
The safety tools were in Skype. I reset it, made that safe. You know, you've got to think
about that. Every parent has to think about that. And the internet industry has to step
up.
Great, thank you. Jo?
As Matt said, it's much... it's a very developing environment. 3D, obviously they're expecting
it in the future, and sort of things. Even though it's developing very quickly, schools
and organisation are used to dealing with much more physical and perhaps very limited
online presence of bullying. And its perhaps more focus needs to be been paid on physical
aspects, such as you said, as managing Facebook. It needs to be somewhat involved in the ICT
curriculum, because it is somewhat patchy. There's no major coverage. People need to
be told how to be safe online and how to sort of protect people from looking at their pictures,
looking at their information. It's very... It's not very well covered even in places
where it is covered slightly, such as we saw on the video. And, um, the development of
the online world means that if something doesnít catch up, there's going to be, we're going
to trip over things in the near future because it is a very fast-developing medium.
Thank you. Alex?
Well I think that sometimes, um, there's a little bit of an element that we don't
know as much about the internet as we think we do. And that's a lot for... Maybe I'm
shooting myself in the foot here, but then we try to get along with this medium that
we use literally all the time, as everyone, as we've all said. But it takes these kind
of shock tactics of hearing about dreadful stories in the news of somebody coming to
our schools saying "We've seen all your Facebook profiles. Guess what we found?"
to actually make us realise, "Oh no, we actually should check this." And the things is, we
cannot wait for somebody else to remind us that we should be being vigilant. We don't
wait to remind us that we've got to cross the road carefully; we just know. So I think
that really it needs to be a grassroots level thing. Back at when you were a much younger
child, when, as I said before, your parents perhaps are using the internet with you, we
need to be instilling ideals then so that as we get to perhaps more my age, it's just
an automatic response rather than thinking "Oh no, I suddenly should do this because
I was told yesterday."
Thank you. Richard?
They told me that some things stay the same and some things have become more complex.
And I think the things that stay the same is that teenagers are avidly social, fiercely
social creatures, and I remember when I was a child - I was thinking as they said that
- that we used to have rotary dial telephones and my mother bought a lock to put on the
telephone so my sister couldn't be on it all evening. And she was doing exactly what
they were doing with the communication technology of the time. Also that further tells me that
whatever communication technology we put out there and we develop - and our business is
dependant, you know, on this avid adoption of the technology - teenagers will take it,
will run with it and, when you listened to them, they all wanted more of it. And they
wanted more complex versions of what they have today. So they are going to run with
it, and that in turn then tells me that we as service providers do have a very clear
responsibility to make sure the services can be used safely, to offer very service-specific
information, because a lot of what they needed was not generic information about how
to use the internet, but very specific information about how to use a particular internet service,
and that we also then need to have very good escalation channels for when things go
wrong so that if there is a bullying problem we can escalate it to a cyber-mentor. If there
is a more serious problem that needs law enforcement engagement, we can escalate it to them. And
so, to me, the role of UKCCIS in particular comes into that last part. I think there's
an element of putting pressure on us as service providers to deliver safe services, but there
is also a strong element of coming together to get these escalation channels right so
that when there are problems we can get the problem to the right person who can actually
help.