Let us talk about internet safety
What you need to know:
- The Internet has upended the way we live, both for good and bad.
Tuesday, February 11, was Safer Internet Day. In a world where internet connectivity and all its risks and benefits continues becoming ubiquitous, this is a day that allows us to focus on the online well-being of mainly our children and young adults.
Our children’s lives, right from preschool are starting to be built around smartphones, tablets and video games. As this happens, parents and their children seem to exist in completely parallel online universes that continually grow apart with each new technological iteration. Save for sharing a roof, occasional meals and biologically engineered need to provide, we have very little else in common with our children; at least not online.
According to the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), Safer Internet Day was an opportunity “to focus on empowering digital users, particularly children and young people, to navigate online spaces responsibly.” They see their role in this as: “promoting awareness, digital literacy, online privacy, and cybersecurity through strategic initiatives and partnerships.
”It makes for beautiful, reassuring reading from the communications regulator but that’s just the start. The real work needs to be done and fast. And not just by UCC.It’s now more than 30 years since the World Wide Web became available to the wider public, so the first generation to grow up in the online era are now fully fledged adults. But while technological advancement in the online realm has come at supersonic speed, approaches aimed at protecting young online citizens might mimic a snail's pace.
The risks around pornography, human trafficking, fraud, access to self-harm imagery, betting addiction etc are only getting more pronounced as technology gets more sophisticated. Children who, in the real world, would never be allowed within a mile of a pub or discotheque are being told, online, that binge drinking is a nice thrill, showing cleavage makes you cool and are being groomed by internet strangers thousands of miles away from the prying eyes of their parents.Who will protect them? Certainly not social media companies, locked up in a bare-knuckles fight for market share. Their interests are primarily to their shareholders and they’ll thus retool their algorithms to facilitate as much online doping to keep as many eyeballs as possible glued to their sites. Adverts have to be sold and money made.
And yet research has repeatedly demonstrated that while parents, governments, schools etc can play a significant role in ensuring internet safety, tech companies are the most effective remedy to this problem.
More needs to be done to have them write age-appropriate code, build facial recognition technology into their platforms, and generally invest more in online safety measures that would redefine the relationship between children and their smartphones.
By the close of 2023, Uganda had an internet penetration of more than 25 percent; that’s about 12 million people, with these numbers projected to grow by more than 15 percent per year.
The bulk of the users are young, perhaps unsurprising, given the country’s demographics.In the same period, Uganda police reported increasing cybercrimes. The 2022 police crimes report showed a 50 percent jump in online crime between 2021 and 2022. This trend is only likely to increase if we don’t do something about it.We aren’t helpless though. The government has responded through legislation in the form of the much-maligned, Computer Misuse Act, Electronic Transactions Act and Data Protection Laws aimed to curb online fraud. More regulations are in the offing.
Their effectiveness might need to be studied.Besides these legislative measures, we shall need to invest significant resources in digital advocacy to improve both access and safety, mainstream digital safety education in our curriculum, empower and equip parents with the knowledge required to protect their children and build partnerships aimed at creating more responsible digital citizens, among other interventions.Bottomline: the Internet has upended the way we live, both for good and bad. We can’t wish it away but can build safeguards that allow us to maximise the benefits while diminishing the risks.The best time to start was 30 years ago. The next best is now.
The writer is team leader, Public Square
@TonyNatif
