Qwant is involved in the Online Child Protection Laboratory

As a digital company, but also as individuals, it is our responsibility to think and implement solutions that will protect our children online.

Now more than ever, it is time to make collective progress on this issue, which has significant, if not serious, repercussions on the development and future of our children.

As such, Qwant signed the call to action launched in 2021 by France and UNICEF to defend children’s rights in the digital environment.

We are honored to be part of the initiative launched by the President of the French Republic, of an Online Child Protection Laboratory.

As a search engine, Qwant offers a gateway to the web. A gateway that must be as safe as possible, to protect our children from malevolence, to offer them a safe browsing experience, free of any inappropriate content, to allow them to form their own opinion, not based on a profile, but on impartial results.

In an OpinionWay survey for 20 Minutes, published in 2018, 82% of children aged 10 to 14 said they regularly go online without their parents.

Our role is to provide parents, and therefore children, with appropriate tools that will offer safe navigation to children:

• Confidential browsing, so that, from a very young age, children do not leave traces of their browsing on the web, and are then considered by brands/sites, as an advertising product, to which content/advertising will be pushed, based solely on their digital profile and on the searches they have done previously.
• Safe, trusted, age-appropriate content that blocks access to violent, pornographic, or malicious content.
• Browsing that respects their privacy, so that they then respect that of others.

For parents and teachers, there is a real need for support and supervision. In a survey conducted in February 2020 by Médiamétrie for Open and Unaf, 44% of parents said they felt little or not sufficiently supported in supervising their children’s digital practices.

At Qwant, we offer tools that meet this need for respect and protection:

• With Qwant Junior, the child-friendly search engine, which offers suitable, unbiased and reliable search results.
• With Qwant VIPrivacy, the browser extension that allows you to block cookies and trackers, when browsing the web, beyond Qwant’s sites.

This awareness-raising, this pedagogy, must also be done in schools, to put all young people on the same level:

• By integrating safe search tools, tracker blockers, on school computers and then during the distribution of computers to high school students, to integrate it into the habits of young people as soon as they have their first computer in their possession.
• By teaching digital practices in schools, to educate on all aspects of the web and in particular on personal data, advertising, advertising retargeting.

Qwant’s teams are committed to raising awareness and educating people to ensure that the subject of privacy and online protection is accessible to all, from childhood.

10 November 2022 – launch of the “Online Child Protection Laboratory” at the Elysée Palace with the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, Brigitte Macron, the President of Argentina Alberto Fernández, the Estonian President Alar Karis, the Special Representative of the Prime Minister of New Zealand Paul Ash, the Ambassador for Digital Affairs Henri Verdier, the Minister Delegate for Digital Transition and Telecommunications Jean-Noël Barrot, the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister, in charge of Children, Charlotte Caubel, and representatives of associations and international digital players (including Qwant 😊).

Qwant’s teams are engaging with other digital players, alongside the Government, in this laboratory for online child protection, to share our knowledge and experience of Qwant Junior, in order to develop new initiatives and build good practices to support and protect children more effectively.

Main image legend : Freepik