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In the physical world, almost every human society accepts that children need different protections than adults do. Peter Membrey asks how we can build this online without building a surveillance state.
Consider a busy road:
- For adults, we provide a pedestrian crossing. We assume they have the agency to look left and right, judge the speed of traffic, and cross safely. We grant them the freedom to navigate the risk.
- For children, we provide a school crossing guard. We acknowledge that they lack the experience to judge that risk, so we provide active intervention to ensure their safety.
We do not treat these two scenarios as being the same. Yet, on the Internet, the infrastructure often does. To a network router or an encrypted tunnel, a packet is a packet. The infrastructure treats a 10-year-old being groomed and a 40-year-old whistleblower exactly the same way: with absolute neutrality.
The binary trap
For years, the technical community has viewed child safety with deep suspicion. We often hear it as a dog-whistle for broken encryption or mass surveillance. We fear that in order to protect children we must strip adults of their privacy, turning the Internet into a digital panopticon where everyone is treated like a child.
This is why I am looking forward to Peter Membrey’s keynote address on Tuesday morning.
The keynote: Protecting children online
Peter is the Chief Research Officer at ExpressVPN. In his talk, Protecting Children Online: What Role Can Open Source Play?, he argues that we don’t have to choose between the wild west and 1984.
He is looking for a digital equivalent of the crossing guard.
He explores how we can implement differential protection in technical infrastructure. This means building systems that can identify and block harm directed at children (such as using Internet Watch Foundation lists to block known abuse material) without needing to inspect the private traffic of consenting adults.
Why this matters
This distinction — between a crossing guard who ensures safety for the vulnerable and a checkpoint which demands papers from everyone — is a missing link in our safety debates.
If we can solve this, we can honour the oldest social contract in humanity — protecting the young — without sacrificing the newest: the right to digital privacy.
Join us
- Session: Keynote: Protecting Children Online: What Role Can Open Source Play?
- Speaker: Peter Membrey
- Track: Cybersecurity & Privacy
- When: March 9, 10:55
- Tickets: EventYay
