It’s summer vacation, and many parents are planning to buy a phone watch for their children. In addition to making it easier to communicate when going out, it can also locate their children’s whereabouts in case of emergencies. However, a parent recently discovered that 299 yuan in the parent's WeChat account was deducted when the child clicked on several functions of the app on the smartphone. This is not an isolated case, many parents who use children’s smartphones have encountered it.
Picture source: Oriental IC
Children's smart watch is not only a watch, but also a smart device. Faced with fierce competition in the market, some manufacturers, in order to make profits, continue to lower prices, and can only adopt the method of "supporting hard with soft" to survive, and make up for the losses in hardware by pre-installing multiple software. Many of them are still under the guise of studying education. What's even worse is that since smart watches and smart watches are generally bundled with parents' mobile phones, when parents are using WeChat, WeChat deducts money without password payment or any prompts, and the App in the smart watch can directly deduct the money. Causing parents to lose money.
Minors are persons with limited capacity for civil conduct. According to the provisions of the " Civil Code ", the execution of civil legal acts shall be performed by its legal agent or with the consent or ratification of its legal agent. This means that without the parents’ knowledge, the deduction of fees for children’s smart watches is illegal, and the manufacturers of children’s smart watches are responsible.
For manufacturers of children’s smart watches, pre-installed apps must be notified, and the characteristics of children’s smart watch users must be considered. Apps with paid items must obtain parental consent and cannot be used by minors at will. You can activate password-free payment with this operation.
In addition to the self-discipline of manufacturers, the competent authorities must also strengthen supervision. In February this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a draft for comments, proposing that manufacturing companies should ensure that pre-installed application software other than basic functional software can be uninstalled, and provide safe and convenient uninstall methods for users to choose. The Cyberspace Administration of China has also continued to carry out special rectification of the online environment for minors in recent years. As a children's smart watch with pre-installed educational apps, it cannot become a "blind spot" and cannot allow "sideline" operations and other activities to be outside the scope of supervision. Before specific details are released, regulatory authorities can force manufacturers to conduct self-examination and form industry standards by asking manufacturers to bear deductions.
To protect the legitimate rights and interests of minors in cyberspace and guide minors to use the Internet reasonably, not only does the software need to turn on the "youth mode", but devices such as children's smart watches also need to have permissions that match the age of their users. The Internet is a dynamically developing field, and children’s smart watch manufacturers have a duty to promote and improve the online protection mechanism for minors.
Fang Xiang/text
