ICO passed Children’s Code

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) passed the Age Appropriate Design Code, also called Children’s Code, which applies especially to social media and online services likely to be used by minors under the age of 18 in the UK.

The Children’s Code contains 15 standards for designers of online services and products. The aim is to ensure a minimum level of data protection. Therefore, the Code requires that apps, games, websites etc. are built up in a way which provides already a baseline of data protection. The following default settings should be mentioned here:

• Glocalization disabled by default,
• Profiling disabled by default,
• Newly created profiles private and not public by default.

Base for the Children’s Code is the UK Data Protection Act of 2018 – local implementation law of the GDPR. Thus, the standards also include the GDPR Data Protection principles Transparency and Data Minimisation.

The requirements also and especially apply to the major social media and online services used by minors in the UK, e.g. TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

The Code is designed to be risk-based. This means that not all organizations have to fulfil the same obligations. The more companies use, analyse and profile data from minors, the more they must undertake to comply with the Code.