Biography

Since entering the House of Lords in 2012, Baroness Kidron has become a leading technology campaigner with unrivalled expertise and a reputation for consulting broadly with academics, NGOs, parliamentarians, parents, children, and industry experts. She is the architect of the influential Age Appropriate Design Code that has been widely adopted and continues to serve as inspiration for protections for children across the globe.

In 2013, she published the 5Rights Framework as a way of recognising that children’s established rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child were being routinely ignored online. The framework called upon tech companies to redesign their services to be rights-respecting and age appropriate by design and default. Five years later, she founded 5Rights Foundation, which now has a global influence on tech policymaking and a team spread across five countries. It has established internationally-recognised standards around persuasive design of online services and adapting online services to different stages of child development, and has influenced a range of international programmes and documents, including the Government of Rwanda’s Child Online Protection Policy and the Children and AI Design Code.

Kidron chaired the drafting committee that supported the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment no. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment. The General Comment was formally adopted in March 2021 and stands as the most comprehensive articulation of the duties of states to children in the digital world.

In 2017, during the passage of the UK’s Data Protection Bill, Kidron introduced an amendment to create the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC). The AADC requires online services to offer heightened privacy to under 18s to reflect the needs of their age and stage of development. 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 September 2022, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act was signed into law by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom. Governments in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania have guidelines or codes based on the AADC.

Kidron served as a member of the House of Lords Communications Select Committee for four years, contributing to inquiries and reports including UK Advertising in a Digital Age, Growing Up with the Internet and Regulating in a Digital World. She was a member of the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee inquiry, the pre-legislative Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Digital Regulation and Responsibility, which she also co-founded. She is currently a member of the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy.

During the passage of the Online Safety Bill, Kidron unified all sides of the House to ensure significant strengthening of the bill, particularly in relation to children. As a result, the Online Safety Act 2023 includes robust standards on age assurance, a clear definition of harms, a duty to consider harm created by service functionalities as well as content, and formal duties on services to be safe by design and to provide a higher standard of protection to children than adults.

Following a number of high-profile inquests in which bereaved families were denied access to data that may have shed light on the circumstances surrounding the death of a child, Kidron has successfully campaigned to introduce legislation which allows coroners to request access to and preservation of data from technology companies that may be relevant to a child’s death. 

During the recent Data (Use and Access) Bill, Kidron made headlines as she delivered several high-profile speeches and introduced amendments that would have empowered creatives to enforce their intellectual property rights against tech firms engaging in largescale scraping of data to train their AI models. Her campaign gained the support of Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney and national newspapers from The Sun to The Guardian, and achieved important concessions from government. She is continuing to press for greater protections for creatives.

Outside of Parliament, Baroness Kidron and Professor Sonia Livingstone (LSE) launched the Digital Futures Commission, a research centre into digital technology for children which became the Digital Futures for Children centre three years later. She is an Advisor to the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, where she has played a key role in the Institute’s Accelerator Programme which brings together people from industry, academia, government and civil society to work collaboratively on AI issues, and where she regularly chairs events on issues such as AI alignment, creativity and design. She was an expert advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board, which published its final report on Governing AI for Humanity in 2024.