Child Financial Harms
The growing threats posed by online financial harms are reaching a crisis point. You can see some of the work we previously did with Nominet to protect children and help parents navigate this troubling digital reality.
An epidemic of child financial harms is unfolding online.
Backed by three years of research, Parent Zone and our consortium partners are calling for action from government, regulators, and industry.
Our definitive six-step action plan aims to halt the criminal exploitation and fraud targeting UK children.
Gaming risk index
The financial ecosystem of gaming has become deeply problematic with gambling like mechanics, pay to win features and systemic financial obfuscation. Parents worry about what this means for their children. Regulators are failing to keep up. Without meaningful interventions we fear things will get worse.
Designing a digital solution
During our work on Child Financial Harms, Parent Zone trained an LLM and designed an interface that provides clear and usable information about what financial harms exist in games. Using AI tools, we have developed a method of scraping app store reviews to flag emergent risks and present the information to regulators, researchers, product teams and of course, parents.
Using chatbots for parenting support
Around 4 in 5 parents are using AI and many turn to chatbots for parenting support. But how useful are they and can they help parents to understand financial risks in games?
Research into chatbots and best practise in prompting
We commissioned youth platform VoiceBox to test different chatbots to determine how useful they are for researching financial harms in games. The results were mixed. Some chatbots are more useful than others and understanding prompting matters
