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"My friend was annoying me with it the whole time. At some point I didn't want my friend to annoy me with it and then I stopped doing it, " says Sascha (12 years old) about his access to WhatsApp. However, Facebook lost to Sascha: "That happened a little with Facebook too. But then I already had WhatsApp and I said: No."

The absurdity of this thoughtless decision can hardly be overlooked: At home, even parents struggle daily for the trust of their pubescent teenagers, but on the Internet the big strangers only need to help themselves. But we can hardly expect our offspring to take this critical point of view, because after all we have created a society that floods its young, manipulable hopefuls with advertising and commerce.

And what do parents do?

With the decision to let their children participate in the online offers of Facebook & Co, the affair is by no means over. On closer inspection, the problems only begin afterwards, because now the question arises of who and what is actually being communicated with.

Due to the structure of the services, parents have little control without interfering with the privacy of their children. In the ring there is the secrecy of letters and telecommunications for children and adolescents on the one hand and the duty of care and the justified care of parents on the other; there is no compromise.

Ultimately, providers such as Facebook or WhatsApp are not at all interested in ensuring that minors can use it properly and safely. Officially, they do not belong to the target group at all - but once you have won them as a customer, you are of course happy, because every host is a good host for a virus. Facebook has recently even completely abolished its previous protection mechanism that prevented minors from posting public messages - it doesn't really solve some problem. The VZ networks, including SchülerVZ, were no exception.

The only way is together

As diverse as the offers on communication platforms are, so are the prospects for well-founded concepts for use by minors and collaboration with parents. This would also require a lot of work, because the operators of the networks do not have the skills and resources to take into account all the complex relationships and questions that arise from the orientation of the offer.

The only way this challenge can be met is if everyone involved works together: children, parents and developers. We want to go this way as an association and are starting our campaign “Whom do you trust?”, With which we want to make free and safe alternatives that have established themselves in the past attractive and accessible for young people.

Our goal is to build a communication network that offers young users all familiar functions and at the same time does not force them to put trust lightly in strangers. In doing so, we want to work openly and transparently with children and parents right from the start, thus enabling the community that is affected to be involved from the outset.

It is already clear that XMPP (better known as Jabber) should be used as the protocol. This makes it easy to offer all the functions that are important to young people and to expand the service at the same time across several institutions. This is important because we, of course, also have no right to force users to trust our systems. The XMPP protocol is to be expanded in such a way that it also enables the above-mentioned requirements for transparency between underage users and parents and implements further precautions for the protection of minors. The aim is to work closely with the standard committees so that interoperability in the Jabber network is maintained.

At the same time, the aim is to collaborate with open source projects in order to make existing Jabber software attractive and usable for young people. At the moment, <a href="http://www.jitsi.org/"> Jitsi </a> and <a href="http://www.jappix.org/"> Jappix </a> are in focus. Ultimately, adult users will also benefit from the developments, as general accessibility will also be improved.

The main goal is to operate a communication platform on which children and young people can feel just as at home as they do with Facebook & Co., but which implements real communication security and data protection, especially with regard to use by minors. Of course, completely transparent and open, so that independent quality control is possible at any time, even by the user himself.

The project is big, but realistic, so we actively started planning. But first a strong team has to be created. To this end, we invite you to a public discussion in March, in which we hope that many interested parties will participate. We offer a newsletter for all interested parties, through which we regularly report on our progress and invite you to public events. Sign-up is possible via the <a href="https://www.teckids.org/wvd/"> website of the association </a>.

Together we can stop trust from being a sales item!

CeBIT: Young people are not a target group for IT

This year, the organizers of CeBIT, one of the most important international IT trade fairs, are for the first time excluding young people under the age of 16 from attending the event. In recent years, a group of schoolchildren, accompanied by a part of what is now Teckids e.V., had the opportunity to look at business life in the IT sector on the last day of the fair. On this last day, adolescents under the age of 16 could access the exhibition grounds when accompanied by a supervisor.

CeBIT 2014 is the first CeBIT on which this last day and thus entry for children and young people is completely left out. An employee of the <a href="http://www.tectoyou.de/"> Tec2You </a> initiative, which supports young professionals in IT professions nationwide and who works with Deutsche Messe, also expressed great incomprehension to us as well as disappointment with the decision of the organizers. It is said that "the under-sixteen-year-olds did not belong to the target group of the exhibitors", the communication and the feedback were not of interest to the companies.

While the character of CeBIT primarily actually appeals to businesses, we cannot understand this generalized attitude, even in the youngest age, in view of the increasing spread of smartphones, tablets, proprietary apps and services. We are convinced that each of the exhibitors can afford at least a single day for meaningful communication with young people. Including this part of the target group in marketing and thus to encourage the consumption of one's own products, but avoiding direct contact, ishighly immoral as we think.

During the same period as CeBIT, Teckids eV will make it possible this year to visit <a href="https://www.teckids.org/froglabs_2014_clt.htm"> Chemnitzer Linux-Tage </a>, an event where every young person is welcome!