Ian Russell: Online Safety Bill will have failed if harm not stopped
- Online Safety campaigner, Ian Russell has said the test of the Online Safety Bill will be whether it prevents the kind of images his daughter Molly saw before she took her own life.
- The bill is in its final parliamentary stages and is due to be law imminently.
- It aims to make social media companies more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms and to crack down on illegal content.
- Mr Russell told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that the bill “will make the online world safer”.
- For more, please visit the BBC News website.
TikTok fined €345m over children’s data privacy
- Irish regulators, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) have fined TikTok for violating children’s privacy.
- The complaint surfaced in 2020 around how the social media app handled children’s data.
- A spokesperson for the social media firm states that it “respectfully disagree[s] with the decision, particularly the level of the fine imposed”.
- Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon told the BBC News that the inquiry found that accounts made by young people aged between 13 and 17 were made public by default upon registration.
- TikTok has been given three months to make its data processing completely comply with GDPR.
- For more, please visit the BBC News website.
Sexual abuse campaigners urge tech firms to protect children on social media platforms
- A coalition of more than 100 sexual abuse survivors, families and child safety experts have written to the heads of major tech platforms demanding they take urgent action to ensure their services are safe for children.
- It urges companies to engage with survivors to assess the child safety risks of new and current products, including end-to-end encrypted messaging services.
- The letter comes as the UK’s Online Safety Bill is in its final stages in Parliament before being passed into law.
- WhatsApp have said the provision regarding end-to-end encryption in the Bill, would compromise people’s ability to communicate securely.
- However, Michelle Donelan, the Tecnology Secretary, insisted that the legislation had not watered down measures to curb encryption.
- For more, please visit the MSN website.
The following story may be regionalised:
Taskforce ‘needed in nightmare disputes’ over care of critically ill children
- The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB), which was asked in December to lead a Government-commissioned review, said the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) should create a taskforce to implement its suggestions aimed at helping to ease “distressing” situations.
- The review contained 16 recommendations and came in the wake of court cases involving the families of Charlie Gard and Archie Battersbee, which ended in separate legal disputes with the NHS trusts caring for them.
- Currently, the parents of a critically ill six-month-old called Indi Gregory, are engaged in a High Court life-support treatment fight.
- Amongst the recommendations, it said NHS trusts in England should inform families within three calendar days of deciding to start court proceedings to give them time to receive legal advice.
- It recommended that the DHSC should establish a taskforce “to oversee the implementation of the recommendations in this report to facilitate collaboration; promote the filling of current gaps in evidence and ensure mechanisms are in place to effect lasting change.”
- For more, please visit the MSN website.
