In 2017, during the passage of the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 Kidron introduced an amendment to create the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC). The AADC requires online services to offer heightened privacy to under 18s to reflect the needs of their age and stage of development, taking into account their rights under UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The AADC prompted the redesign of digital products and services and introduced concepts and definitions that have become the benchmark for child-focused digital legislation in the EU, US and beyond.
In September 2022, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act was signed into law by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Kidron served as a member of the House of Lords Communications Select Committee for four years, contributing to inquiries and reports including UK Advertising in Digital Age, Growing Up with the Internet and Regulating in a Digital World. She was a member of the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee Inquiry and the pre-legislative Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill.
She is the Co-founder and Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Digital Regulation and Responsibility, which brings together parliamentarians from both Houses.
During the passage of the Online Safety Bill, Kidron unified all sides of the House to ensure significant strengthening of the bill, particularly in relation to children. The protections afforded to children under the Online Safety Act 2023 (as it is now) establish a new global standard and reinforce the upstream ‘by design’ approach that characterised the AADC.
As a result, the Act includes robust standards on age assurance; a duty to consider harm created by the design of services that encompasses functionalities as well as content harms; a clear definition of harms on the face of the Act; and an articulation of the overarching purpose of the Act including a formal duty on services to be safe by design and to provide a higher standard of protection to children than adults.
Following a number of high-profile inquests in which bereaved families were denied access to data that may have shed light on the circumstance surrounding the death of a child, Kidron successfully campaigned for amendments to enable coroners to require access to data when an online company may have played a part in a child’s death.
Beyond the UK Parliament, Baroness Kidron is a Commissioner on the UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development; a member of the Global Council on Extended Intelligence; a member of the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Global Action on Problematic Usage of the Internet; a member of the Advisory Council for the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI; a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics; a Senior Fellow in the Computer Science Department at University of Oxford; Chair of 5Rights Foundation and Chair of the 5Rights Foundation Digital Futures Commission.
In 2022, she featured in Politico’s Tech 28 Power Players.
“I’ve worked in public administration, different forms all my life, and I’ve never seen anybody who gets shit done like this.”
William Perrin, former adviser to Tony Blair and trustee of the Carnegie Trust in Politico.