The Safer Runet Week’s 19th edition started with a series of roundtable discussions on digital security for children. Held at the Civic Chamber of Russia, these events were organized by the Office of the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights with the participation of the Center for Safe Internet and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
As usual, roundtables in this format brought together representatives of the digital sector, scholars and industry actors, government officials and law enforcement executives. Their main mission consists of working together on the security front in the era of digital technology in view of the existing and future challenges.
“It is essential that everyone who is involved in the digital industry, including hands-on practitioners, legislators, government officials and teachers, make sure that they are on the same page in order to effectively address digital threats. It is for this reason that it is so important for us to exchange information and share our best practices in ensuring comprehensive security during events of this kind,” the moderator of these roundtables, Coordinator at the Safe Internet Center and Director at NeDopusti! Foundation, Urvan Parfentyev, said.
The first roundtable discussion was titled Children Online: Safety, Trust and Coming of Age in a Digital World. It focused on the current situation with digital security for children and teenagers. Yevgeny Khasin from the Ministry of Digital Development said that changes in this domain used to take years, but now they can happen within a month. Moreover, both good-faith users and digital criminals can access new technologies and the opportunities they offer. Accordingly, there is a need to be responsive in adapting not only the defensive mechanisms, but also information and educational materials to this landscape.
Kaspersky Lab weighed in with some insightful statistics. Almost all – 89 percent - Generation Alpha kids had their own personal devices by the age of seven. Family time is also becoming increasingly structured by these devices with 48 percent of parents spending time with their children using digital devices, which includes watching films, educational, development and nonfiction shows, playing video games, reading and discussing news. Overall, parents tend to use digital devices for protective purposes, with 71 percent of parents saying that they gave a smartphone or smart watch to their children in order to track their location. Another 60 percent used them for discussing everyday matters online, while 49 percent said that they wanted to know how their children were doing.
Officials from the Interior Ministry’s Department for Combatting Cybercrime supported the idea that creating informational bubbles in the digital space and blowing them out of proportion was unacceptable, since this led to escalating panic or inspired children to follow negative examples. Law enforcement agencies have been dealing with the account rental scheme which consists of de facto leasing a messenger account to other users, who are usually scammers, in exchange for money. It turned out that 80 percent of the 160,000 channels of this kind in a popular messaging service formally belonged to minors.
Titled Teenagers in the Digital Economy: Protecting Rights and Avoiding Risks, the second roundtable discussion followed up and elaborated on the topic of drawing children into cybercriminal activity by exploiting their desire for easy money. This time, participants discussed a specific topic dealing with labor relations and enabling teenagers to work in the digital economy.
Andrey Zhdanov from the Ministry of Labor said that the main trend these days consisted of what seemed to be totally non-digital professions such as welders and miners undergoing digital transformation. The ministry carried out a field study in three regions to learn that young job applicants are primarily interested in education, trade, human resource management and minerals extraction. According to the official, it is quite easy for young applicants to get their first job considering their modest wage expectations and their focus on prioritizing career opportunities over pay. He went on to say that there was a gap between the professional aspirations and expectations for these job applicants. They tend to aspire to fulfill their potential as much as possible, while designating the level of income as their number one expectation from their work.
In Andrey Zhdanov’s opinion, this field study has helped demonstrate the mythical nature of some of the stereotypes about employment and work preferences of the young people. For example, the idea that almost all teenagers want to work in the digital sector proved to be a myth. The same is true about the way young people apply for jobs. Only 30 percent of respondents used digital platforms to contact potential employers, while 35 percent searched for their first jobs by asking around, mostly offline.
Head of social projects at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and coordinator of the Smart Internet Foundation, which operates the .ДЕТИ domain zone, Viktoria Bunchuk focused on specific resources for raising awareness and helping choose the future profession. In her remarks, she talked about treating children as participants in the digital economy in their own right, and argued that the counseling and educational materials had to reflect this vision. They must also be presented in a youth-friendly format, in particular, by speaking to young people in a language they can understand. This suggests the need to submit these materials for review to young people. She also said that that the Coordination Center has already assumed this approach – some of its materials were presented during the event and handed out to the participants. Viktoria Bunchuk talked about the Domain Patrol project for blocking platforms involved in illegally exploiting minors. Its mission consists of ensuring that domain names are not used for illegal purposes. In addition, she presented a teachers’ professional upgrade course titled Internet Security Risk Prevention, as well as the online training tool Study the Internet – Govern It!, the flagship project for children and teenagers.
Follow the updates on the Safer Runet Week events on its official website, and tune in for the live streams, take part in quizzes, challenges and creative marathons as part of this event.
