Family 4.0

On May 16th the Kompetenzzentrum Menschenrechte Universität Zürich and RFK Human Rights Switzerland organized an event on challenges of (family) life in the 21th century. With more than 80 registrations, there was just enough room for everyone.

Our first guest was Dr. iur. Sandra Husi-Stämpfli, Head of the staff division Digital Compliance and Governance at the Generalsekretariat EJPD and Data Protection Officer at the EJPD. She spoke about different challenges when it comes to what one might summarise as family 4.0. Many parents seem to forget, or don’t even know, that their children have privacy rights right too and that posting pictures of them as a baby is in violation of those rights. The first court cases of children suing their parents because of the digital footprint the parents created of their children without consent, are a fact. Another telling example of the challenges when using digital technology on children, are tracking devices. At first glance it may seem like a good idea to track your child to make sure it reaches school safely in the morning. But what when these devices are used to listen in on the playground or during class? And having the possibility to talk back to child through this tracker at any given moment?

The second speaker was Patrick Stangl, Police Zürich and specialty teacher for violence & crime prevention. Mr Stangl talked to the audience about the school work he does and how he and his colleagues visit school classes from an early age on to talk about different kinds of (cyber) crime prevention. Depending on age, the include getting safely from home to school and back to digital pornography, all kinds of assault and violence (both digital as well as in the real world) and extortion. How Mr Stangl addresses these issues is by role playing and making the pupils part of the solution. They have to imagine different situations and together think about what the best way would be to do in such a case.

Afterwards their was room for questions from the audience.

The event can be re-watched (in German) on the website of the Kompetenzzentrum Menschenrechte: https://www.menschenrechte.uzh.ch/de/Veranstaltungen/MRZ-Video-Podcast.html