Guardians of the Digital Playground: Legal Safeguards for Children’s Cybersecurity

Nikita Tayal

Published on: 2025-09-04

Abstract

With ever-increasing digitalization, the most pressing concern today is that of the cybersecurity of children, which necessitates robust legal protection mechanisms for the children's rights and privacy. Sitting at the intersection of positive and negative worlds of professionalism, wavering between the intricacies of legislative frameworks and jurisprudential principles designed to address the myriad vulnerabilities that minors are subjected to in cyberspace, the article, “Guardians of the Digital Playground: Legal Safeguards for Children's Cybersecurity,” looks into the different legislative instruments under discussion, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), among others in Commonwealth legislative domains. The contributions include domestic statutory instruments such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Information Technology Act, 2000, complete with its rules in a kind of jurisdiction like India.

The paper critically engages with issues like data minimization, informed consent, and fiduciary duties, all from the perspective of an online platform processing children's data. The paper also examines the doctrine of parents patriae as a basis for judicial intervention against exploitation and cyber abuse. This paper particularly looks at the screwing together of international obligations and national regulations to create a harmonized set of child-centric cybersecurity norms within different jurisdictions.

It explores the very challenge of enforcement, including the functions that data protection authorities perform, regulatory penalties, and cooperation across borders by the framework of the Budapest Convention itself. The paper, thus, positions the nexus between advancing the technology and legislative inertia as a challenge to be met by developing dynamic, curative legal paradigms at the end of the day that would muster the sanctity of the digital playground while effectively safeguarding children's fundamental rights therein.