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"To Lawmakers and School Administrators: As parents and caregivers, there is nothing more important to us than our children's safety. That's why we're calling for an outright ban on the use of facial recognition in schools. We're concerned about this technology spreading to our schools, infringing on our kids' rights and putting them in danger. We don't even know the psychological impacts this constant surveillance can have on our children, but we do know that violating their basic rights will create an environment of mistrust and will make it hard for students to succeed and grow. The images collected by this technology will become a target for those wishing to harm our children, and could put them in physical danger or at risk of having their biometric information stolen or sold. The well-known bias built into this technology will put Black and brown children, girls, and gender noncomforming kids in specific danger. Facial recognition creates more harm than good and should not be used on the children we have been entrusted to protect. It should instead be immediately banned."

"'Much easier to say no': Irish town unites in smartphone ban for young children Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary 'no-smartphone code' in bid to curb peer pressure Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent @rorycarroll72 Sat 3 Jun 2023 09.00 BST Last modified on Sat 3 Jun 2023 09.02 BST On the principle of strength in numbers, parents in the Irish town of Greystones have banded together to collectively tell their children they cannot have a smartphone until secondary school. Parents' associations across the district's eight primary schools have adopted a no-smartphone code to present a united front against children's lobbying. "If everyone does it across the board you don't feel like you're the odd one out. It makes it so much easier to say no," said Laura Bourne, who has a child in junior infants. "The longer we can preserve their innocence the better.""

"They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material. Emma Hardy, UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) director, said the pictures were "terrifyingly" realistic. "The quality of the images that we're seeing is comparable to professional photos taken annually of children in schools up and down the country," said Hardy, who is also the Internet Watch Foundation communications director."

""Robots are a great educational tool for children. It inspires them to learn about science and engineering," Sharkey told the Guardian in March. "But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare." "

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a common tradition in Danish public schools. While the children are eating chocolate cake, the teacher pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects data on how they've been feeling. Organized to display the classroom's weekly "mood landscape," the data shows that the class averaged a mood of 4.4 out of 5, and the children rated their family life highly. "That's great!" the teacher exclaims, raising two thumbs up in the air. She then moves to an infographic on sleep hygiene. Here the data shows the students struggling, and the teacher invites them to think of ways to improve their sleeping habits. After briefly talking among themselves, the children suggest "less screen time at night," "meditation before sleep," and "having a hot bath." They collectively make a commitment to implement these strategies. At next week's cake time, they will be asked whether or not they followed through."

"Nearly half of three to four year-olds (48 per cent) were reported by their parent or guardian in the Ofcom survey to have used apps or sites to send messages or make video or voice calls. Those who did mainly used WhatsApp (25 per cent) and Facetime (19 per cent). "It's likely that children of this age were receiving help with these communication activities as they are still developing basic reading and writing skills," said Ofcom. The disclosures prompted a warning by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner, that young children should not have internet-enabled phones because of the risk of them accessing harmful content."

"Facebook knows its systems lead teenagers to anorexia-related content. The company had to "break the glass" and turn back on safety settings after the 6 January Washington riots. Facebook intentionally targets teenagers and children under 13. Monday's outage that brought down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp meant that for more than five hours Facebook could not "destabilise democracies"."

"Why? Because it has an internal app store that puts its young player base to work making virtual stuff and selling it for scrip or peanuts while the company pockets the profits. It even promotes the far-right personalities and groups using it to recruit. It is a ruthless money machine that embodies the perverse incentives of social media, aimed directly at children and operated by amoral reptiles."

"The research has found many children do not even recognise these promotions, known as content marketing, as advertising. It warns that this may lead to children following betting companies on social media, making it more likely that they sign up with them when they turn 18 and can legally gamble. Dr Raffaello Rossi, lecturer in marketing at Bristol University, one of the report's authors, said content marketing was particularly popular with young people."

"Advertising agency JWT China and missing children site Baby Back Home have jointly developed an app in China that utilizes facial-recognition technology to help identify missing or kidnapped kids, Creativity Online reported. The organizations say that, with a population reaching approximately 1.4 billion, everyone can be a search volunteer."

"Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, "represents the nexus" of the problem with internet-connected appliances and toys: children being recorded, data being leaked, and the technical possibility of surreptitious access to children through networked toys. "The best way to understand what these guys do is to simply watch the video [advertisement for the toy].""

"There is no quick technical fix that will protect children - it needs education, responsible parenting and more resources for enforcing the laws that already exist. Dr Martyn Thomas Institution of Engineering and Technology"

The South Korean government is to ban school-aged children from playing online games during the night.

"Iqbal Khan works as a chauffeur in Lahore. His children are in his home village in a rural area north of Peshawar. Both of these very different areas of Pakistan have the same problem for many of their young people: no means of getting access to an education. Online learning was not an option for Khan's children as the pandemic locked down schools across cities and countryside. Even as he worked to pay the school fees, his two sons, aged 16 and 13, were unable to access any lessons as their schools went digital."

"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."

"Facebook's gol' durn algorithm is acting up again, say humans working at Meta, who apparently have no control over the automated system that approved ads calling for the murder of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his children."

"Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including "pictures of adult genitalia", according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday."