1,721,002 research outputs found
Substantive and procedural legislation in the Netherlands to combat webcam-related child sexual abuse
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Wouter Hins en het mediarecht in Nederland : een terugblik, vanaf de andere kant van de grens
No full textOverzicht van ontwikkelingen in het mediarecht in Nederland en Europa, met focus op het journalistiek bronnengeheim en recht op openbaarheid van bestuur, en de rol en inbreng van prof. W. Hins op deze domeinen
How Devices Transform Voting
Full text linkSeveral European countries have been involved in the implementation of electronic forms of voting in elections. This may include electronic voting machines at polling stations, Internet voting, or both. In the former, the registration and counting of the votes is done electronically, but authentication of the voter and the protection of the secrecy of the ballot still depend on traditional means. In the latter, voting is done remotely from any computer, and the polling station is abolished as protective space. To allow observation of the elections (Vollan, 2006), it is deemed essential that the voting procedure be verifiable. From a technical perspective, the combination of voter anonymity and verifiability is challenging. However, even if a satisfactory technical solution were found, electronic forms of voting challenge the democratic process in other ways. Whereas technology once had the reputation of contributing to explicit goals in an instrumental way, philosophers have now realised that it also changes our experience and existence in ways that had not been intended. Moreover, many requirements of procedures to be automated are implicit, and the automated versions may thereby “act‿ differently. In this contribution, we analyse how electronic voting shapes democratic forms of voting from the perspective of technological mediation. First of all, we introduce the requirements that are generally accepted to apply to the voting process. We then zoom in on the history of electronic voting in the Netherlands, explain how the country finally abolished electronic voting, and recast the problems encountered in terms of implicit requirements. We then generalise the notion of implicit requirements to include broader forms of changes in human experience and existence, by referring to the philosophical work on technological mediation. Applying this theory to electronic voting, especially Internet voting, we identify challenges that we need to face, should electronic voting come back on the political agenda
Age assurance and age appropriate design what is required?
No full textConcerns for children’s online safety recently focused on the new evidence of the possible negative effects of Instagram on teen mental health reigniting long-standing questions of how best to protect children from accessing harmful content. Age assurance is a much-debated topic in relation to children’s online safety, often cited as a plausible solution to creating an age-appropriate online environment. But what exactly is age assurance and when should it be implemented by online platforms? For www.parenting.digital, Professor Simone van der Hof discusses the legal requirements for age assurance and the suitability of different verification methods. Based on her recent research as part of the euConsent project, she argues that many of the methods currently used are either inefficient, privacy-invasive or raise issues for children rights
Protecting children from the risk of harm? : a critical review of the law's response(s) to online child sexual grooming in England and Wales
No full textThe primary argument this chapter makes is that the existing law may inadvertently underplay or even increase the potential risk of harm from Online Child Sexual Grooming (OCSG), as the OCSG process is not criminalised by the so called ‘grooming offence’ under section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (s.15 offence). The history of child sexual grooming is difficult to put into context because it has only recently been recognised, not only academically, but legally, as a distinct stage of the process of child sexual abuse. Online grooming has proved similarly difficult to define. This chapter explores the phenomenon of OCSG alongside current understandings of the grooming process to illustrate how OCSG allows a groomer to progress through the stages of grooming more quickly because, for example, personal information is readily available on social networking sites, and enables the groomer to target several children at once. The internet is a site of vulnerability not only because of the potential it offers to access children across national boundaries but also because of the relative anonymity it affords to the groomer. Groomers who target adolescents online are better able to conceal their identities than ‘face-to-face’ groomers, and can entice adolescents into ‘virtual relationships’. The online groomer’s development of trust and compliance may involve sexually explicit communications and the exchange of sexually explicit images of the child, a valuable tool to ensure further compliance and secrecy due to the threat of the material being publicly released. Having analysed the phenomenon of OCSG, the chapter then turns to its central focus: the way in which the law tackles OCSG and the limitations of the current s.15 offence. Despite the absence of a common definition of the phenomenon and ambiguity surrounding what constitutes grooming behaviour, it received significant attention by the legislature several years ago, leading to the announcement and enactment of the s.15 offence (which relates to meeting with a child following grooming). Notwithstanding the law’s acknowledgment of the dangers the internet poses to children, online grooming behaviour and ‘meetings’ in the virtual world that occur as a part of OCSG are excluded from the s.15 offence, despite amendments made in 2008 that were directly aimed at providing a greater level of protection to children by intervening in the grooming process at an earlier stage. This chapter concludes that the vagueness of what counts as grooming behaviour in the legislation encourages misconceptions about the dangers and risks OCSG poses to children and the circumstances in which grooming and online meetings could occur. This could result in children being offered less effective protection from sexual abuse
Children and peer-to-peer risks in social networks: regulating, empowering or a little bit of both?
No full textChildren’s rights online: challenges, dilemmas and emerging directions
No full textIn debates over internet governance, the interests of children figure unevenly, and only partial progress has been made in supporting children’s rights online globally. This chapter examines how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is helpful in mapping children’s rights to provision, protection and participation as they apply online as well as offline. However, challenges remain. First, opportunities and risks are positively linked, policy approaches are needed to resolve the potential conflict between protection on the one hand, and provision and participation on the other. Second, while parents may be relied on to some degree to balance their child’s rights and needs, the evidence suggests that a minority of parents are ill-equipped to manage this. Third, resolution is needed regarding the responsibility for implementing digital rights, since many governments prefer self-regulation in relation to internet governance. The chapter concludes by calling for a global governance body charged with ensuring the delivery of children’s rights
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