Protection Of The Information Rights Of Minors In The Digital Society

Abstract

In modern society, special attention should be paid to the problems of protecting information rights and freedoms of minors. Continuously changing social relations carry a potential danger to the harmonious development of minors. Since information is received continuously through telecommunication networks (mobile devices), children receive an avalanche stream of negative information: manipulation, psychological impact, involvement in gambling, pornography, sexual relations, illegal business, drug addiction, teaching to cheat parents, teachers, peers, etc. A hasty, ill-considered, and not regulated by the law transfer of the economy into digital form can cause additional real damage to the information security of minors. The article analyzes the impact of the processes of building the digital economy associated with the removal of regulatory barriers (key legal restrictions) that impede the development and functioning of the digital economy on the state of information security of minors. It is necessary to overcome key legal restrictions, while preventing the emergence of new threats to the information security of children. These problems should become the subject of the closest scientific analysis. In addition, it is necessary to carry out constant monitoring to obtain feedback, assess the real effectiveness of state regulation, development of all segments of the digital economy in order to identify newly emerging information threats. The main task in the course of removing key legal restrictions should be the creation of legislation that anticipates the emergence of problems and risks for minors, and also allows you to minimize their consequences during the digital transformation of public relations.

Keywords: Children, digital transformation, information security, risks, minimization

Introduction

The most important aspect of the legal support for the development of the information society in the Russian Federation is the problem of ensuring information security (Rybakov, 2017). Currently, a comprehensive system for ensuring information security of minors is being formed at the level of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, as well as at the levels of regional, regional, and municipal education authorities and educational institutions. This activity is taking place in parallel with the process of digital transformation of public relations in the Russian Federation. Modern society is at the stage of a global transition to a new technological order associated with the “digital economy”, the features of which are determined not only by changes in technology, but also to an equal (if not more) degree by the state of public institutions (Kartskhia, 2019). The digital economy in the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of 09.05.2017 No. 203 “On the Strategy for the Development of the Information Society in the Russian Federation for 2017 – 2030” is defined as an economic activity in which the key production factor is digital data, processing of large volumes and the use of analysis results which, in comparison with traditional forms of management, can significantly increase the efficiency of various types of production, technologies, equipment, storage, sale, delivery of goods and services.

Today, despite the fact that it is at the stage of construction, the digital economy is an objective reality, and the digital transformation of traditional social relations requires the improvement of management technologies. The main goal of regulatory regulation in these circumstances is the formation of a new regulatory environment that provides a favorable legal regime for the emergence and development of modern technologies, as well as for the implementation of activities related to their use (Belitskaya et al., 2019). Activities on introducing systemic amendments to legislative acts in order to implement priority measures for the formation of the digital economy and the creation of new legal institutions in the Order of the Government of the Russian Federation of July 28, 2017 No.1632-r “On approval of the program ‘Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” (now not operating) was described as the removal of key legal restrictions. The implementation of this initiative will require adjustments to many legislative acts. Even despite the fact that the legislator in the documents that replaced the State Program “Digital Economy”: “Passport of the Federal Project’ Normative Regulation of the Digital Environment”, approved by the Presidium of the Government Commission on Digital Development, the use of information technologies to improve the quality of life and the conditions for doing business, minutes of 28.05.2019 No.9 and Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of 02.03.2019 No. 234 “On the management system for the implementation of the national program ‘Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” (together with the “Regulations on the management system for the implementation of the national program ‘Digital Economy of the Russian Federation”) refused from the use of this term and uses another “regulatory barriers that impede the development and functioning of the digital economy”, we believe that this process is not completed and is underway. We find confirmation of this in the List of tasks and results of the federal project “Normative Regulation of the Digital Environment” and in the analytical materials of experts who came to the conclusion that real legislative activity in the digital sphere have been reduced to point changes in existing mechanisms (Yankovsky, 2020).

The digital transformation of public relations, first of all, should be aimed at improving high quality of life and work of citizens, while the issues of protecting the rights and freedoms of man and citizen, and the functioning of democratic institutions of civil society should not be forgotten. The removal of key legal restrictions required for digitalization undoubtedly has an impact on all processes taking place in the country, including the level of information security of minors.

Also, the translation of public relations is associated with the processes of improving the regulatory environment by using the mechanism of the so-called. “Regulatory guillotine”, i.e. reducing the costs of the state budget and business expenses for fulfilling excessive regulatory requirements. The main document on the implementation of the “regulatory guillotine” mechanism is the “road map” and the methodology for its implementation, approved by the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation on May 29, 2019 No. 4714p-P36. The need to maintain or abolish mandatory regulatory requirements is in direct proportion to the criteria for redundancy in regulation, as well as to quantitative calculations of the growth in costs from meeting such mandatory requirements (Didikin, 2019). The risk is due to the fact that the draft federal law “On mandatory requirements in the Russian Federation” being developed, which stipulates conditions, restrictions, prohibitions, as well as the obligations of citizens and organizations aimed at protecting values ​​protected by federal laws, will be canceled from January 1, 2021 regulatory legal acts that entered into force before this date and contain mandatory requirements (Project No. 851072-7). The provisions of the bill apply, inter alia, to public relations related to mandatory requirements in the field of information security. The problem is that existing norms that have not yet been replaced in modern legislation can fall under the knife.

Neglecting issues of information security of minors in the process of legal regulation of the digital economy can have serious consequences. Greater behavioral literacy in the digital environment is a necessary component of digitalization. Minors in the future must become full participants in public relations, and not just deceived consumers of digital goods, they will need to understand how technology affects their lives and what dangers they pose. The state is interested in young people becoming technologically interested citizens and it is of great importance that this transformation takes place in a safe environment. This will not be easy to accomplish. It will take more resources than just guaranteeing them access to the Internet and teaching them how to set a password for access to personal data and devices.

Problem Statement

Previous studies show that the digitalization of the economy and the accompanying hasty digitalization of public relations can harm the information security of minors and have a negative impact on the following components of the social life of children, such as: violations in personality authentication, dominant low network literacy, coupled with information activity, information vacuum when receiving reliable information, ambiguous assessment by the child of his own capabilities, which will result in the risk of losing a goal in life (Bukalerova et al., 2019).

We have put forward a hypothesis that the process of digitalization of public relations entails additional risks of violation of information rights and freedoms, as well as information security of minors. The rule-making processes in the Russian Federation do not provide for an assessment of the introduced initiatives in terms of their impact on the level of information security of children. At the same time, the digitalization of modern society, the avalanche-like transfer of most of the processes in which minors are involved in telecommunication networks, especially in the light of the recent events associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, urgently requires an effective assessment of the regulatory legal acts adopted during the regulation of this process in order to identify and minimization of all negative factors of information security of minors.

Most of the problems that do not allow individual norms of various laws and regulations to form a coherent coordinated system of legal provision of information security for minors, society faces at the stage of law enforcement. It is unrealistic to avoid these difficulties in advance, but they must be promptly identified and sought to minimize (Belov et al., 2018). An integrated system for ensuring the information security of minors is aimed at reducing the likelihood of threats being realized through effective monitoring of the current situation and the provision of information that ensures the timeliness of management decisions (Rogovaya, 2017). Monitoring of law enforcement makes it possible to identify and predict the list of information rights and freedoms of minors that are violated or potentially subject to negative impact in the course of the digital transformation of public relations.

Research Questions

Various kinds of monitoring, tracking social, economic, or political processes. Currently, there is a tendency to conduct monitoring studies on ensuring the safety of the educational environment of educational organizations, as well as on issues of scientific, methodological, and regulatory and legal support for compliance with sanitary and hygienic requirements for the use of information and computer tools in education (Andrichenko et al., 2015). In our opinion, the generalization of legislative prescriptions, taking into account practice in the monitoring process are one of the important factors that play a positive role in eliminating defects in legislation on ensuring information security of minors.

The term “monitoring” is quite often found in Russian legislation in the meaning of one of the forms of state control (Abrosimova et al., 2017). The trend in recent years has become that in Russia, special attention is paid to monitoring law enforcement. First of all, monitoring provides for comprehensive and planned activities carried out by the federal executive authorities and state authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation within the limits of their powers to collect, generalize, analyze and evaluate information to ensure the adoption, amendment, or invalidation of laws and other regulations.

In accordance with Article 19 of the Federal Law of July 21, 2014 No. 212-FZ “On the Fundamentals of Public Control in the Russian Federation”, public monitoring is understood as constant (systematic) or temporary observation of the activities of public authorities, local governments, state and municipal organizations, carried out by the subject of public control, other bodies and organizations exercising certain public powers in accordance with federal laws. This form of public control makes it possible to exchange and evaluate law-making practice, generalize, and unify the accumulated experience, improve the forms and means of organizational and legal activity of public administration bodies.

Tikhomirov (1972) expressed the opinion that it is necessary to extend the monitoring action to the entire list of legal phenomena, defining it as a dynamic organizational and legal institution of an informational and evaluative nature, moving through all stages of the functioning of management, management, etc., manifested at all stages of the emergence and operation of law. Chirkin (1997) emphasizes that when studying the institutions of the state, analysis of legal norms is not excluded, but the emphasis is not on the “de jure” phenomenon, but on the “de facto” phenomenon, since it is not about the legislation regulating the legal status of the institution, but about the phenomenon itself.

Monitoring is a promising scientific method, especially in the context of modern modernization of society and the development of information and communication technologies. It can be considered as one of the new analytical and evaluative mechanisms that are becoming an integral part of the interaction between the state and society (Barinov et al., 2019). However, the potential of this mechanism is not fully used. Despite the obvious developing trend in the use of this method, as well as its important role in the digital age, it does not cover information security issues. In our opinion, monitoring can be used as a new methodological model that expands the scope of knowledge for solving the problems of our research.

The monitoring function as tracking the processes actually taking place can be actively used in legal science. The monitoring action is aimed not at discovering objective reality, but at organizing the experimental process and tracking its dynamics, the result of which is knowledge. Recently, more and more new directions of research have appeared, which are defined precisely as monitoring ones (Sapelnikov & Chestnov, 2015). In our opinion, the facts of the demand for the results of work on monitoring law enforcement, carried out in various sectors, prove that the choice of this method for obtaining initial data is the most optimal in the process of developing scientifically based proposals. These proposals improve the efficiency of rule-making activities to ensure the rights and freedoms of minors in information sphere and minimize the negative consequences of the digital transformation of public relations.

Monitoring synthesizes many functions, uses different means of observation and explanation. In fact, it covers all traditional research methods. However, monitoring uses a more specific and well-targeted study than conventional analysis. It can be both partial and selective analysis, which has an initial condition, a task, and a pre-formulated target purpose. When it is carried out, the very process of researching this or that phenomenon and its result are deliberately delimited, and then monitoring takes on the meaning of a way of tracking the process, step-by-step observation, control measurement of something that already exists, is partly determined and is observed as something to one degree or another. known (Farman, 2012).

According to Gorokhov and Glazkova (2008), in order to achieve uniformity of terminology, it is advisable to use the concept of “legal monitoring”, which covers such stages of legal activity as the law-making process, the assessment of the quality of existing regulatory legal acts, the law enforcement process. The use of this concept, which is the most universal, will allow not only the uniform interpretation of monitoring activities by lawyers (scientists and practitioners), but also the use of uniform terminology in regulatory legal acts (Gorokhov & Glazkova, 2008; Gorokhov et al., 2012).

Purpose of the Study

The use of such a tool as monitoring is dictated by the need to obtain feedback, assess the real effectiveness of government regulation. The essence of monitoring consists in passive observation of the monitoring subject for the monitoring object. The purpose of such observation is the collection of information, which can be carried out both with the knowledge and without the knowledge of the object of observation. The purpose of monitoring in relation to our research is to improve the legal system of the Russian Federation and to ensure an appropriate level of information security in the context of digital transformation of public relations.

Such activities are needed for several reasons: the instability of legislation in the field of regulation of information relations; its excessive politicization; the presence of facts of regulation of relations that are homogeneous in nature in different ways; a tendency to overuse prohibitions; quickness or excessive delay in the time of adoption of normative acts without preliminary adaptation of citizens to the new rules; low attention of the legislator to positive international experience; insufficient consistency between the provisions of regulatory enactments; implementation of law-making activities without taking into account the experience of law enforcement.

Research Methods

In this work, we will consider monitoring as a method of scientific knowledge. In order to implement it, we propose a monitoring mechanism, which is based on the basic principles of classical monitoring of law enforcement specified in the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of May 20, 2011 No. 657 “On monitoring law enforcement in the Russian Federation” and the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of August 19, 2011 No. 694 “On the approval of the methodology monitoring of law enforcement in the Russian Federation”, Resolution of the Government of the Russian Federation of January 30, 2015 No. 83 “On assessing the actual impact of regulatory legal acts, as well as on amendments to certain acts of the Government of the Russian Federation” (together with the “Rules for assessing the actual impact of regulatory legal acts”) and at the same time is unique both in the direction of research and in the specially developed procedure for their implementation and the volume of the covered array of law enforcement practice. In this connection, we will not use the term “enforcement monitoring”.

In addition, the procedure for monitoring law enforcement described in the regulatory enactments has a drawback associated with the complexity of the very scheme of its implementation provided for by Decree No. 657. Thus, more than two years pass from the moment of approval of the monitoring plan to consideration of the prepared report. It is obvious that in this format it is impossible to timely respond to urgent problems arising in the legal field of the Russian Federation (Gorbachev & Zudov, 2019), especially during the digital transformation of public relations.

The complexity and uniqueness of the study lies in the fact that, due to the constant instability of state regulation of the National Program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation”, the lag behind the planned deadlines for the adoption of documents that remove regulatory barriers that impede the development and functioning of the digital economy, the urgency of taking some initiatives due to coronavirus, will require us to expand the object of monitoring and evaluate newly adopted initiatives in the absence of sufficient law enforcement practice for representative conclusions, as well as subject to analysis of initiatives that, for a number of reasons, did not become the rule of law. They are available for reading and were subjected to critical analysis by the legal community and public. For this, independent expert assessments, review of complaints, analysis of sites will be involved in order to predict negative trends that will entail their adoption. According to Polyakova and Khimchenko (2019), taking into account the dynamics of the ongoing processes and the low response rate of law (as an inertial system), legal forecasting is of decisive importance for the formation of a high-quality regulatory environment for the development of society, state, and business.

The effectiveness of monitoring is determined by the relevance of the problems under study, the completeness of coverage of the array of acts on the issue. This completeness is provided by the analysis of information posted in the public domain in the SAS Justice, the Official Internet portal of legal information, the SPS ConsultantPlus and other sources, for which we used the appropriate linguistic means. In addition, in order to increase efficiency, as many of the problems studied are related not only to jurisprudence, but also to other fields of science, the monitoring study is based on information obtained by specialists in other specialized fields.

At the beginning of the study, we will determine the methodology for its implementation. The research was carried out in several stages, presented in Table 01.

Table 1 - Stages of research
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We have selected current regulatory legal acts, local acts and the practice of their application, as well as legislative initiatives aimed at removing key legal restrictions to ensure the digital transformation of public relations. We chose the ones that may potentially contain risks of violation of information rights and freedoms, as well as lowering the level information security of minors. All selected acts were analyzed for the possibility of containing potential risks for minors in the following areas, which are summarized in Table 02.

Table 2 - Potential risks for minors during the digital transformation of public relations
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In the course of monitoring, statistical information of state authorities and other state bodies, as well as unofficial sources of statistical information with a high degree of trust, such as the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, Romir, Levada Center, statistical studies of leading universities in Russia, etc.

The fixation of the results of the monitoring carried out by drawing up an analytical table.

Findings

During the monitoring of the current regulatory legal acts, local acts and the practice of their application, as well as legislative initiatives aimed at removing key legal restrictions to ensure the digital transformation of public relations in order to identify the risks of violation of information rights and freedoms, as well as information security of minors, the article reveals the following shortcomings in the adopted normative legal acts and draft laws.

We have summarized all the data in analytical Table 03, which shows the potential risks for minors in the materials selected at the second stage (Table 02) of the study. The presence of risks in the table is marked with a “+” symbol.

Table 3 - The presence of risks for minors in the course of removing key restrictions in the digital transformation of public relations
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Conclusion

High-quality legal regulation of relations in the field of implementation of the policy of digital transformation of public relations is a factor of stability and progressive development of society. However, modern legal activity entails a number of specific risks that inevitably arise due to objective reasons due to the complexity, novelty, and constant modernization of these relations. The presence of these risks determines the likelihood of negative consequences, which significantly complicates the achievement of the final result, which the public authorities rely on. The primary task that must be solved at the state level in order to protect the information rights and freedoms of minors in the context of the digital transformation of public relations is to minimize these risks when adopting legal regulations.

The problems identified in the course of this study should become the subject of further close scientific analysis in order to create special research and institutional structures whose functions will include the development of recommendations and other materials both for law-making bodies and for parents, children, teachers in the field counteracting the negative impact on children of the digital transformation of public relations.

Acknowledgments

This article was prepared in the course of fulfilling the state assignment on the topic “Protection of information rights and freedoms of minors in the context of digital transformation of public relations”.

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Cite this article as:

Ostroushko, A. V., Bukalerova, L. A., & Kutuev, A. R. (2021). Protection Of The Information Rights Of Minors In The Digital Society. In D. K. Bataev, S. A. Gapurov, A. D. Osmaev, V. K. Akaev, L. M. Idigova, M. R. Ovhadov, A. R. Salgiriev, & M. M. Betilmerzaeva (Eds.), Knowledge, Man and Civilization - ISCKMC 2020, vol 107. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 1217-1230). European Publisher. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2021.05.162