Quote:
Originally Posted by peanut
And there's one born every minute...
Seriously, most of the 'Online Safety Act' could or should be the responsibility of parents, school and the person. Education should be top priority (regardless of age) and not just push blame on to others such as social media etc.
Give your bank details over the phone, then expect to get scammed. Send a dick pic expect it to be shared. Watch porn online then expect your child (or even adults) to have a warped view of what is acceptable or what is normal (what is normal)?. All could be avoided with the right information and proper education. Pushing the blame elsewhere isn't right which is all what this act does.
The problem is now young adults / parents are affected just as much as children. But they are the ones that will set the example. It's not just children that now need protecting or to be educated.
|
We all have a part to play where this is possible, by this I mean that some people are more vulnerable to scammers etc by reasons of things like age, disability, mental health issues etc. It's often the case that people think that everyone else has the same skills & capabilities of themselves, which is not the case.
A voluntary code of practice by website owners to protect vulnerable people was mostly ignored by them, so the law has had to step in to require them to protect our most vulnerable instead of them just concentrating on how much money they can make.
Your last paragraph and comment about education are both excellent points.
---------- Post added at 23:46 ---------- Previous post was at 23:22 ----------
A group of schools in Southwark are to introduce a collective principal regarding smartphones from September. This is based on a programme of education rather than an outright ban.
Phones are sometimes permitted, for example for disabled children, but if anyone is found to be using one for no good reason it will be confiscated. One child who needed access to the internet due to health concerns started using a smartwstch. To get the phone back a parent will have to come and collect it so that a dialogue can be opened.
Parents can then be informed about it causing any interruption to learning and a discussion can be had as to whether the child actually needs the smartphone, whether it should be returned to them or of a basic non smartphone would be more appropriate.
They did this after concerns about childrens health from using smartphones particularly in respect of social media.
Concerns included mental health issues, body image problems, cyber bullying, grooming, access to and viewing of innapropriate content, problems with the attention span of young people and the fact that social media is purposely engineered & designed to cause repeated engagement. The smartphones themselves as a device have been known to give rise to criminal activity.
They feel that the best way to stop young people from using social media is for staff & pupils to collaborate to enable them to make the choice not to engage with it until they are older.
It's not going to be an outright ban, though obviously pupils won't be able to start surfing the Internet during lessons.
An interview with one of the heads of one of the participating schools can be heard from about 0:15:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zw50