It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), not least because my own brief contribution will be simply an extension of the points that she made.
When I first came to this place, I was lucky enough to have dinner with some people from Facebook. We were invited to their headquarters in London, and were given an example of how they used data to influence purchasing activity. Facebook knows that elderly people are not frequent users of the site, but that grandparents are keen users just before the birthdays of their grandchildren. Facebook knows everything about us, so of course it knows when our grandchildren’s birthdays are, and it probably knows what sort of toys they are interested in and what sort of films they watch. All information of that kind is held. Facebook can start pitching advertisements for appropriate products to people two weeks before their grandchildren’s birthdays, even before they themselves know what would interest their grandchildren.
I am not suggesting that we should use the Bill to introduce a tough code of practice to protect grandparents, but given that Facebook holds that data and can manipulate it in such a way, we should certainly protect young children from similar practices. I am concerned about whether 13 is an appropriate age of consent. People might be reassured by the fact that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp require users to be at least 13, but, as was pointed out earlier, there are no checks to establish that that is the case. We should be particularly concerned because there has been an incredible proliferation in the use of mobile devices by young people. Research conducted in 2014 across many countries in Europe and in Japan found that children typically get their first phone at 10 years old. Other research carried out more recently suggests that between 2014 and 2017 there has been a doubling of online use by five to seven-year-olds. It does not matter what the starting point was.