Children’s access to information has sometimes been disproportionately restricted in order to allegedly protect children. This makes it central to the debate around encryption, privacy and protection. To mark International Right to Know Day, we explore some of the questions and tensions in this debate through the lens of children’s access to information.

All children have the fundamental right of access to information. It is a foundation for how children learn about the world around them and how they exercise their other rights. It also enables them to make informed choices in their lives. Despite this, access to information has sometimes been subject to disproportionate restrictions in the sometimes questionable guise of child protection, whether to restrict children’s access to information about health, politics, religion or their access to relationships and sex education. It is in this context that the impact of encryption on children’s access to information challenges the perceived ‘privacy vs. protection’ divide in how children use technology.

What right do children have to access information?

The UN Convention on the Rights of Child sets out children’s fundamental right to freedom of information in Article 13, which protects children’s ‘freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds’. In addition, Article 17 requires States to recognise the function of the mass media and ‘ensure that the child has access to information […] from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health.’

However, the Convention also provides for restrictions on children’s access to information, where they are ‘provided by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others; or for the protection of national security, public order or public health or morals.’ The Convention also requires States to encourage the ‘development of guidelines to protect children from information and material injurious to [their] well-being’.

Some scenarios

One of the patterns of restrictions on children’s access to information proposed in order to protect them from ‘injurious information’ is the criminalisation of the ‘promotion of homosexuality to children’. Therefore, LGBT+ children, especially those who live in countries where homosexuality is stigmatised or criminalised, are disproportionately impacted by encryption. Encrypted platforms enable these children to access information that helps them, for example, to understand their sexuality, answer questions they might have around physical and mental health, and connect with other members of their community.

For children who live under repressive regimes, where cyber-censorship is practised, encryption also plays an important role in facilitating their access to information, for example by giving them the opportunity to seek and receive information by critics of the regime. 

Children from religious minorities might also be disproportionately impacted by encryption in exercising their right of access to information. For example, in England schools are required by guidance to have filters and monitoring systems to detect signs of ‘radicalisation’. Where children’s searches are flagged, they could be referred to the UK’s counter-terrorism programme Prevent, which potentially discriminates against Muslim children. On the other hand, encrypted channels can be used to propagate hate speech against particular religious minorities, which could lead children to censor themselves when seeking information about their religion, for example around ways to come together with their community and practise it.

Lastly, an aspect of the discourse around the risks of encryption for access to information that has received less attention so far relates to the open access movement. Children who are part of this movement believe in democratising access to academic knowledge, by making it available to the public online, for free. Where access to scholarly articles is based on subscription fees and protected by encryption, some of these children might undertake what they see as an act of civil disobedience. They might decide to break into encrypted systems, in violation of the law, in order to make academic knowledge available for the benefit of the general public, without obtaining any financial gains themselves. This raises difficult questions regarding the inequity in access to information across the world and the extent to which society is prepared to accept radical activism around open access to knowledge.

Moving beyond ‘privacy vs. protection’

Examining the implications of encryption for children’s right of access to information reveals a complicated picture. The right of access to information encompases both privacy and protection when it comes to children. In the debate around children’s use of encryption, a rights-based approach must reflect the challenges and benefits that encryption poses to the rights, and also how the full range of children’s rights interact with and support each other.

This article is part of a series produced for a joint project between CRIN and defenddigitalme exploring a children’s rights approach to encryption. It might be further refined and updated as our own understanding of the topic develops.

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