UK AADC Standard 1 - Best Interests of the Child (Participation Rights)
Services must provide age-appropriate mechanisms for children to express preferences and participate in decisions affecting their digital lives
Where this comes from
Provision: Standard 1 - Best Interests of the Child (Participation Rights)
Instrument: UK Age Appropriate Design Code
Citation: Information Commissioner's Office, Age Appropriate Design: a code of practice for online services, Standard 1; UNCRC Article 12
Text version: ICO Age Appropriate Design Code (statutory code under Data Protection Act 2018 s 123), issued 2 Sept 2020
Who it applies to
Child audience (designed for OR likely accessed by children) — any one of these:
- Service is specifically designed for children under 18
- Service is likely to be accessed by children under 18
What engineering work it implies
Sample acceptance criteria Landfall generates for this obligation:
- Implementation or documented process meets the reviewed acceptance criteria; identify the tested version and deployment status separately
- Configure defaults from the assessed source and purpose; do not enable data collection or processing merely because this task exists
- Validate behavior for the assessed actors and use cases, including applicable guest or administrator paths
- UI clearly communicates what the feature does to users
- API returns appropriate error codes when feature blocks an action
Questions people ask
- Does UK AADC Standard 1 - Best Interests of the Child (Participation Rights) apply to my service?
- It applies when at least one of: Service is specifically designed for children under 18; Service is likely to be accessed by children under 18.
- From when does this apply?
- UK AADC Standard 1 - Best Interests of the Child (Participation Rights) applies from 2 September 2021. Its current status is: in force.
Find out whether this one lands on you
Landfall's pre-scan answers the applicability question above for your product in minutes, then turns every obligation that applies into traceable engineering tickets with a citation chain your auditors can follow.
Not legal advice. Landfall maps regulatory obligations to engineering work for planning purposes. Its verdicts are not legal advice and create no attorney-client relationship — verify with qualified counsel before relying on them.