#kids-harms

Here are breaches of trust, safeguarding, privacy and law. They expose kids to risks of online harm and discrimination.

Charities and public services must not share kids or encourage kids to share their troubles with social media and ad systems.

Social media only allow sites to use their embeds if sites respect terms regarding age limits, parental consent and data collection.

Had these organisations paid attention to the terms, they may have realised that what they were doing was wrong.

If you are distressed by any content, please seek support. The Samaritans are available on 116 123.

Stop It Now! (The Lucy Faithfull Foundation)

What are the charity getting wrong?

The Stop It Now service is for helping to stop cihld sexual abuse.

A significant target audience obviously includes children suffering or who have suffered child sexual abuse

So it makes sense that the page "Have you been abused?" starts with "If you suffered abuse as a child or you are a young person currently suffering abuse, help is available."

Whether a chlid follows the advice to go there or they go there directly, the Helpline page includes a video.

The video content is hosted using YouTube embeds and therefore directing the children to the online harms risks of YouTube.

The embeds were not using YouTube's privacy enhanced mode. Thus, from a privacy perspective this was a worse situation than the Childline situation currently.

As a result of this, identifiable data was being sent to YouTube's systems is that the child is seeking the child sexual abuse helpline. Basically, telling Youtube that the YouTube user is quite probably a child sexual abuse victim.

Furthermore, the YouTube embed asks the child to "Watch on youtube.com" when they hover over the YouTube icon and the video title takes the child to YouTube. Thus the embed the trust and charity chose, is encouraging the kids to go to YouTube, where they are then at risk to the online harms risks outlined on the NSPCC article on this site.

Is it all fixed?

When last checked, no.

Raising the complaint

8th January 2023, the charity and the ICO received a complaint detailing how YouTube were tracking the Helpline page.

Response so far

11th January 2023, the response advised:

Thank you for your email. We are in the process of updating our cookie policy to ensure our consent arrangements are clear and that we are compliant with data protection legislation. This will include ensuring that simply continuing to use our site does not enable all ‘necessary’ and ‘non-necessary cookies’ plus we will be introducing a clearer cookie pop up with access to more information so that informed choices can be made. In addition we are ensuring consistent use of the enhanced privacy mode on our embedded You tube videos.

I appreciate you bringing these matters to our attention.