Friday, 8th of August 2025
The ICO has recently published a report of the data lives that children lead online in the UK. This comes after the release of The Data (Use and Access) Act, (DUAA).
The report explores how children feel and interact within digital spaces.
A few key takeaways:
- Bypassing age verification has been easy for kids to do so far
- Recommended algorithm feeds shape the views online and offline
- Kids' awareness of data agreements is limited: cookies and privacy are rarely well-understood
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A BBC study reveals the dangerous tension between child protection and democratic freedoms. As a result of The Data (Use and Access) Act, (DUAA), platforms have been censoring issues such as parliamentary debates on grooming gangs, war coverage from Gaza and Ukraine and classical art imagery to avoid fines for noncompliance.
The BBC found that up to 59% of users browse without age verification, meaning that a vast majority of adults are effectively experiencing a child-filtered internet. Oxford's Prof Wachter warns this these measures are not about protecting children but "suppressing facts of public interest."
According to the BBC, the safety efforts to protect children online need better implementation systems from tech companies.
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Italy's competition authority launched an investigation into Meta for integrating their Meta AI feature into WhatsApp without user consent, thus abusing their competitor position. This AI feature, added to WhatsApp in March 2025, forces users to accept AI services they didn't request, potentially harming competitors and violating EU competition rules.
There was no explicit opt-in consent, and not users were not given the choice to accept the AI integration.
If the court rules in favour of the Italian competition authority, Meta may face fines up to 10% of their global revenue for breaching competition laws.
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OpenAI has quietly removed ChatGPT's 'share' feature that allowed 4,500+ private conversations to became publicly searchable on Google. Users wanting to share their conversations with friends or family were not aware that these conversations became searchable on Google as soon as they were shared via a private link.
Users unknowingly exposed sensitive discussions about mental health, relationships, and personal matters, which reveal a high level of risk for personal data. Even "deleted" ChatGPT conversations are permanently stored due to ongoing litigation, so users should be careful with entering any personal information into AI systems.
Take-away: never share sensitive information with AI chatbots and review privacy policies carefully before engaging in a service.
