Mitigating Risk and Ensuring Human Flourishing Using Design Standards: IEEE 2089–2021 an Age Appropriate Digital Services Framework for Children

Abstract

Online digital services have changed the way that people interact. Companies provide apps for download allowing users of any age to experience them through smartphones and tablets among other devices. To date, company policies have acted as pseudo-guidelines for recommended use. But what happens when apps that were never designed for children are acquired and used by them? To mitigate potential risks the IEEE 2089–2021 standard was developed- an age appropriate digital services framework for children. The standard stipulates the need for a risk-based age appropriate register by which developers can do away with potential intolerable harms on children during the design phase, and keep track of unintended hazards, in order to counteract ongoing negative impacts on children, allowing them to thrive and flourish. Supplementing international law, state regulations, and company policies related to acceptable use, IEEE 2089–2021 provides a benchmark for how children’s apps should be designed based on the 5Rights Principles. Technical standards can be considered a type of soft law, supplementing hard law like treaties or acts, and even non-legally binding instruments like declarations and policies. Together this panoply of safeguards can mitigate the potential for flaws in product development, ranging from data privacy breaches, location tracking default features, nudging toward in-gaming purchases and autoscrolling, child labor toward data annotation, and adverse metaverse experiences. But given the rapidity of product development cycles, it is technical standards that can have the most immediate effect on the pacing problem ensuring that child rights impact assessments (CRIA) are implemented in practice.