The Children’s Commissioner has released a new set of guidelines that hope to ‘jargon bust’ terms and conditions and teach young people about their rights on social media sites.
The guidance
The new guides, published on TES, are one page documents explaining what the terms and conditions mean for each social media site.
So far there are guides written for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and YouTube. Each of the guides are also broken down into three sections – ‘our rules’, ‘your rights’ and ‘our rights’.
The guides include explanations about; the age a user need to be to use the services, the rights you have whilst using the site (eg. The right to complain or ask for content removed), as well as information about the types of data these websites might collect about you.
Why is it needed?
The guidance is developed from the Children Commissioners’ Growing Up Digital report which tested the Terms and Conditions of Instagram with a group of young people and found that many struggled to understand these.
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, has said:
“Children have absolutely no idea that they are giving away the right to privacy or the ownership of their data or the material they post online,”
Drawbacks of simplifying terms
However, it has been pointed out that simplifying terms might not always be helpful.
In this BBC News article, Robert Lands, from law firm Howard Kennedy, said:
“There are a number of reasons that terms and conditions are quite long. It’s not to confuse people, it’s the opposite. When you need to explain difficult concepts, sometimes it takes words to do it.”
The BBC News article also shows how Instagram has said that there were inaccuracies in the simplified version of its policies.
“It is wrong to suggest we share young people’s personal information, contact details or content of direct messages with advertisers without their permission. Nor do we share details of who people are messaging with.”
