FEED: What key regulations are currently in place? Are they helping?
FEED: How do you overcome the age-old debate on first-person shooters?
DAISY SODERBERG- RIVKIN: Most regulations throughout the world cover a variety of platforms. In the UK, the big one is the online safety bill. In the US, there isn’t really a central law that addresses online safety, instead there are multiple that cover different online sectors. There’s our children’s online privacy protection act (COPPA), which focuses on keeping children’s data safe – very similar to the measures you see in GDPR and the EU. For example, when I was working at Lego, we would
consult with product teams and make sure we didn’t use kids’ data at all, period. That can be a challenge because you’re trying to determine how well you’re performing and without any data that’s really difficult. In Australia, they have an online safety act which creates some online safety expectations for companies. Again, these are regulations that are very good in theory. But when you are on the other side of it and trying to implement those things, you realise how subjective safety is.
DAISY SODERBERG-RIVKIN: If we have learnt anything from prohibition, it’s that just getting rid of something or outlawing something isn’t going to stop people from doing it. It usually makes things worse. Also, kids are way more technically savvy than we give them credit for. If you don’t let them do it, they will find it somewhere else. So, then we come back to this idea of preparation in the offline world. Making sure that although what they are playing might be fun, it’s fictional. Making it clear that whipping out a gun and shooting someone is not okay and illegal. There are also games that are getting more creative, picking up on what it is that kids love so much about Fortnite, and mimicking those without the violent component. I’m not saying that
someone has found the solution. There’s never going to be a silver bullet to this. But balance is a good thing, making sure that there are non-violent competitors in the market among the big players like Call of Duty and Fortnite.
“INTHE US,THERE ISN’T REALLY A CENTRAL LAWTHAT ADDRESSES ONLINE SAFETY”
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