Dr. Mary Aiken:

That is a great question. When a digital image is taken there is metadata embedded in the image. Crack tools are available online where a person can crack the image to release the metadata. This will include the GPS co-ordinates of the image. A child could take a photo and embedded in that image is the location. The metadata will also contain the date. This date is important because it tells the predator that the child who looks like a seven or eight year old in the image is still that age and, therefore, it is not an old image and the child falls within the predator's preference range. Predators are also profilers; they look at location, the date and the time of day. If a child is taking explicit images of himself or herself it may be at the time the child is unsupervised and this might give a window of opportunity for somebody to call to the house and actually to the door, to try to engage with the child. We are haemorrhaging data through these platforms. Whatever about adults being aware of our digital exhaustion, a child who is seven, eight, nine or ten years old is not aware of the consequences of their activities. This is why we have to adopt a protective stance. If we could get children to the age of 15, which is what we are trying to do with the digital age of consent, in an environment where they had maximum levels of parental involvement and protection then I believe we would be doing a great job. It is our hope that Ireland could lead in this area. As scientists we are more than happy to work on age verification methodologies and protocols to create an entire use case for how this might actually happen. Ireland could lead the world in this area. We are a small market and we have the tech companies here. I do not know any tech company that wants to be involved in something where a child suffers harm. Recently the Apple shareholders wrote to the company to say they were worried about this issue. There will be liabilities down the line because of how children have been harmed by their use of certain social media.