The right to privacy and informed management of one’s image are some of the most valued rights among the youth – this year’s report “Mature to Rights” prepared by the Orange Foundation with a team of over 40 experts has shown. However, in Poland, these rights are not sufficiently respected, especially in the digital environment. The issue stems from a lack of respect for the agency of children and insufficient protection of their data. Significantly, parents often contribute to this issue. To draw attention to these matters, the Orange Foundation has decided that it will not use images of children in its communications. This makes it the first and so far the only entity in Poland to take such a step.
“We have decided to stop publishing images of children in our communication, and this is an expression of our respect for their agency,” says Konrad Ciesiołkiewicz, president of the Orange Foundation. “We thought about this for a very long time, almost a year, and we asked ourselves whether a child, if asked, would agree to the publication of their image, or whether they would be fully aware of the consequences of this situation. We had our doubts. And if we – dealing with children’s rights in the age of the information society – have such doubts, it means that it was high time for us to give it up.”
This decision also aims to draw public attention to the increasingly common problem of thoughtlessly and excessively posting pictures and videos of children online without considering their boundaries and opinions on the matter.
“While I understand the need for parents to ‘share’ their children, I encourage them to do so cautiously, for a closed group, because once a material is placed on the internet, we lose control over it. It’s always worth asking oneself, what would I like to be known about me, and whether I will be able to remove what I have put on the internet if my child asks me to do so. These are two initial questions worth asking before we start making something public about our children online,” says Magdalena Bigaj, president of the Digital Citizenship Institute Foundation. “Child rights are an area that parents must take care of, because the children will not claim them, at least not until they are adults.”
“The right to privacy is one of the fundamental human rights, including that of a child. Unfortunately, in Poland, this right is violated on a daily basis. That’s why – wanting to signal the right direction – we had to take such a step as the first,” says Konrad Ciesiołkiewicz.
According to data from the Central Statistical Office of Poland, children and adolescents constitute a group of over 7 million, which is almost 20% of the society, and they have defined rights not only in the real world but also in cyberspace. These are defined, among others, by the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989. However, due to the rapid development of technology, the world has changed significantly since then, and today children and adolescents spend a large part of their time in the digital environment, using the internet, games, applications, messengers, or social media.
“Today, children and adolescents grow up in a digital environment. And it is the business that shapes this environment. Therefore, it is very important for the creators and co-creators of new technologies, who create applications, use the internet, construct their marketing messages, to remember that children also use these things,” says Magdalena Bigaj. “The digital space is a place where, unfortunately, the rights of the child – such as the right to privacy, protection from all kinds of violence, to grow up in a safe environment – are often not respected.”
This was confirmed by this year’s “Mature to Rights” report prepared by the Orange Foundation with a team of over 40 experts, according to whom the state of realization of rights and agency of children in Poland in the age of the information society is poor (rated at 2.6 points on a 10-point scale). Experts have pointed out a number of problems, such as hate speech and cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content and advertising, lack of respect for the agency of children, insufficient protection of their data and images, and too slow implementation of regulations governing the protection of images of children and adolescents on the internet.
“I hope that in many industries – such as advertising – we will soon be able to observe self-regulation related to the protection of children,” says the president of the Digital Citizenship Institute Foundation. “A good starting point for implementing such regulations is the Charter of Children’s Rights in Business. This document, on one hand, is based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN recommendations concerning the rights of the child in the digital environment, and on the other hand, it is open enough to allow each industry to adapt this charter to the specifics of its work.”
