Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation and accountability. She has played a determinative role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world.
Kidron sits as a Crossbench Peer in the UK House of Lords. In 2018, Kidron introduced a ground-breaking piece of data protection legislation, the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC), which 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 2023, Kidron united all sides of the House to ensure significant strengthening to the Online Safety Act 2023 establishing a new global standard and reinforcing the upstream by design approach that characterised the AADC.
Kidron is the Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation. Under her leadership, 5Rights has pioneered a range of international policies and programmes, such as developing a Child Online Protection Policy for the Government of Rwanda; creating a Global Model for Child Online Protection; and working in partnership with IEEE to create Universal Standards for Children and for Digital Services and Products. 5Rights also supported the UNCRC in drafting a general comment (no. 25) on the relevance of children’s rights to the digital world.
Kidron is 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 Senior Fellow in the Computer Science Department at University of Oxford; a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics (LSE); and Chair of Digital Futures for Children, a joint research centre between 5Rights and LSE.
Before being appointed to the Lords Kidron was an award-winning film director and co-founder of the charity Filmclub (now Into Film).
