This is one of the government’s priority projects in the digital sector. The exposure of young people to hateful content and online pornography has been on the rise in recent years. “In our country, we access pornography around the age of 13. The imagination and the sexuality of young people are constructed by the brutality of these images. We must protect them in the face of this content ”, declared Emmanuel Macron during his speech to Unesco in 2019.
Two years after this speech by the French president, no real measure has been taken by the government to try to stem the exposure of young people to inappropriate content. While there are currently means of filtering Internet access, they are not sufficient. This is the reason why members of the presidential majority have just tabled a bill “aimed at encouraging the use of parental control on certain equipment and services sold in France” allowing access to the Internet.
“Forcing all manufacturers to integrate parental controls by default”
This bill aims in particular to oblige manufacturers of computers, smartphones and other connected objects to install a parental control system on their devices by default. “The equipment or services allowing access to the Internet will be the subject of reinforced obligations in order to make more systematic, simple and user-friendly the use by the parents of the control devices”, specifies the text. This bill also includes a control of the proper respect of this obligation by the National Frequency Agency (ANFR) and the harmonization of these functionalities “in order to guarantee the same standard of quality to all households”.
“There are children who accidentally come across content that is totally inappropriate for them,” explains Bruno Studer, LREM deputy for Bas-Rhin and chairman of the National Assembly’s cultural affairs committee. “There are too few parents who take it up, and among the parents who do not take it, there is an over-representation of the most disadvantaged social categories: they are those who lack the technical knowledge to handle these tools, because installing parental controls is still too complicated today, ”adds the deputy for Bas-Rhin, at the origin of this text which will probably be examined in January in the Assembly and which, in the event of adoption , would make France a pioneer in the protection of children on electronic devices.
“Parental control is unknown and underused”
Asked about this by 20 minutes last February, the Secretaries of State for Digital Cédric O, and in charge of Children and Families Adrien Taquet, made the same observation. “More and more young people are confronted with pornography and inappropriate content. By the age of 12, almost one in three children has seen porn content. And half consider it shocked them. There is also a gap between the perception of parents: only 7% of them think that their child watches porn every week, while they are three times more likely to say so, ”they explained.
The two Secretaries of State had also invited Internet service providers, search engines and mobile telephone operators to sign an anti-pornography “charter” to limit the exposure of minors to this content. The goal is already to set up an integrated parental control solution to protect minors. “Parental control is unknown and underused: one in three French people does not know it. Today we must make it easier to use, ”said Cédric O.
According to an Ifop poll and a public consultation carried out by the National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms (CNIL), on which parliamentarians were based on the initiative of the text, only “46% of parents of young people aged 8 to 17 years old have implemented solutions to follow the activity of the child on the Internet ”. However, the same document attests that “82% of children aged 10 to 14” and “95% of 15 to 17 years” indicate that they regularly go on the Internet without their parents.