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Helping kids who encounter porn: ‘The Talk’ x3

15-May-12

It’s no longer just two talks that parents need to have with their kids, the New York Times suggests – “the early lesson about the ‘birds and the bees’ and the more delicate discussion of how to navigate a healthy sexual life as a young adult” – but now also “the [online] pornography talk.” It’s a great piece that quotes top sources on the subject, almost echoing one by my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid in the Huffington Post last January: “What to Do if Your Child Is Looking at Porn.”

Both quote psychotherapist, sex educator and author Marty Klein, whose advice to parents in the Times suggests to me, actually, that it’s best not to have just three big-deal talks, but occasional low-key conversations that anticipate what a child can encounter online. “Conventional wisdom has held that strict rules about screen time and installing filtering software will solve the problem,” the Times’s Amy O’Leary wrote. “But given the number of screens, large and small, that fill the average American home, those strategies may be as effective as building a bunker in the sand while the tide rolls in.” It’s not really as bad as she makes it sound. It’s truly not a tide of porn that online kids face – in fact, unwanted exposure to porn actually decreased (11%) among US 10-to-17-year-olds between 2000 and 2010 (see this). But don’t let tech safeguards like filtering software create a false sense of security and keep you from having the conversations.

Dr. Klein said it’s a lot easier for both parents and kids if communication is open and not reactive – such as after finding some graphic content in a teen’s browser history or cellphone or comforting a child who’s stumbled on some highly inappropriate content when searching for “My Little Pony” videos.

But if parents haven’t gotten around to the more casual conversations, they also shouldn’t sweat it. It’s just easier without the build-up or guilt about procrastination. No matter what, if a parent finds a child has been viewing pornography intentionally, the discovery can be turned into a “teachable moment,” but it’s important not to overreact, both articles cite experts as saying. The Times cites the view of Elizabeth Schroeder at Rutgers University that “many parents don’t react so calmly…. They may wonder what is wrong with their child or if what the child has seen will forever traumatize him or her. Neither assumption is correct, [Schroeder] said. The greater potential harm – and shame – can come from a parent’s reaction.”

Larry wrote that “you don’t need a psychologist or a pediatrician to recognize how this can be an extremely embarrassing situation for you and your child. After all, you’re entering into the child’s private space.” Daniel Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, told him how important it is that parents not make their kids “feel as if they’re somehow abnormal or perverted.” It helps to separate the activity from the developmentally normative feelings behind it, Dr. Broughton said. He told Larry that parents might want to seek professional advice for themselves on how to deal with the behavior, but “that doesn’t mean you should seek professional care for your child.”

After we were on a conference panel together recently, Dr. Klein kindly sent me his slide with some talking points parents can use when they want to talk with their kids about online porn. You’ll want to calibrate to what’s developmentally appropriate for your child, but here are the key points:

  • “It’s fiction, not a documentary”
  • Those are “atypical bodies” and “atypical activities”
  • “It’s edited” or “photoshopped”
  • “Adults play sex games”
  • “Different people relate to porn differently – how does it affect you?”

There’s much more wisdom in both the New York Times and Huffington Post articles – I highly recommend them. The bottom line: Keeping communication lines wide-open “is the best safeguard against any potential harm,” the Times reports – as with every aspect of online and mobile safety, I’d add.

Filed in Risk, Risk & Safety, online porn, porn | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0) »

‘What’s Your Story’ video winners announced

15-May-12

As one of the judges for Trend Micro’s “What’s Your Story?” video contest, I was delighted that the grand prize went to a collaborative student project this year. “Choices” was a project of the Video Club at South Grand Prairie High School in Grand Prairie, Texas. It illustrates that good experiences online and on phones “all come down to the decisions we make,” as the producers put it. They added that “we hope people will think about all the decisions they face when they use a cell phone. Sometimes a small decision can have a big impact. If you make good choices, you’ll be ok.” A number of the entries promoted and modeled caring, courageous use of digital media and technology. The South Grand Prairie Video Club won a $10,000 prize. The seven category winners’ videos, both schools’ and individuals’, each of which won a $1,000 prize, can be viewed here. The contest’s judges represented a number of commercial, nonprofit and governmental organizations: our own ConnectSafely.org, the ID Theft Resource Center, Canada’s privacy commissioner, the Cyberbullying Research Center, CTIA’s Wireless Foundation, Commonsense Media, and – besides Trend Micro – Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook.

Filed in Online Safety Education, Reputation, Risk & Safety, Safety, cellphone safety | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Might social media critics factor in the view from developing countries?

14-May-12

Those of us in developed countries can get so wrapped up in the potential downsides of social media that we can barely imagine how much positive potential they represent in developing countries, where some parents work hard to get their children mobile phones that connect them to the rest of the world – and possible upward mobility – through services such as Twitter, Facebook and Google (see this). In the news media we’re often reminded of how global social media are, yet critics here give little indication they’re factoring in perspectives outside the US. Here are some insights from a young activist in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which raise the crucial question of how to support full, healthy participation in social media, wherever they’re used, rather than spread fear and encourage roadblocks….

In honor of International Girls in ICT Day, a two-year-old initiative of the UN’s ITU, Arsène Tungali, who I met after he traveled from neighboring DRC and spoke at the Internet Governance Forum in Kenya last fall, recently (and impressively in English, most probably his third language) wrote a blog post about the barriers to tech adoption Congolese girls and women face.

There are financial, infrastructure, and cultural hurdles in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Tungali says people can learn basic “ICTs” (information and communications technologies) at “data centres scattered throughout the city [his city of Goma, a provincial capital in the DRC], paying between $60 and $80 to learn MS Windows, MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint,” but that’s pretty prohibitive in a country with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world (USAID said it was $500 in 2006, and now it appears to be closer to $300). There are cybercafés, Tungali writes, but they charge the equivalent of a $1 an hour.

Mobile can be safer, more reliable

Then there’s the basic struggle for adequate electrical power. Last fall, Tungali said Goma, or at least his part of it, only had electricity at night (from 11:30 pm to 6 am), so, as for people in many developing countries, mobile connecting is much more reliable – and safe, where most people, especially youth, can’t own their own computers and connecting through cybercafés can only happen at night. Tungali, who graduated from the University of Goma in 2009, said he uses YouTube, Skype, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia on his mobile phone, though it’s not a smartphone (here’s his Facebook page and that of the nonprofit organization he co-founded for training youth in ICT, Rudi International, which hopes to hold a Girls in ICT Day next year).

Facebook Zero helps. Launched two years ago, it’s a low-bandwidth, bare-bones version for mobile phones that makes using social media and connecting globally so much more possible for people in developing countries with basic cellphones (Tungali writes that most young people in his area use it). Because of agreements Facebook struck with mobile carriers in 45 countries, including in the DRC, the carriers in those countries assess no data charges for using Facebook Zero on mobile phones (see the chart at the bottom of this page and BBC coverage showing that, in the UK, Facebook represents “nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones”).

Last summer the Times of India reported that cheaper Internet-ready phones could well make India Facebook’s biggest market after the US this year, with more than 50 million users – because, last year, the number of active FB accounts there jumped 85% to 32 million, FB’s third-largest behind the US’s 153 million and Indonesia’ 39.2 million users. [See also "Snapshot of how Indian youth use social media" and "Data update: Social media use around the globe."] With mobile phone use just taking off in Africa, we can expect to see fast-growing uptake of social media on that continent too, at least for people who don’t find the cultural challenges too great.

Cultural hurdles for women especially

For women in the DRC, the cultural hurdles are high – “customs and traditional behaviors that represent how the young woman is educated in society from birth,” Tungali wrote. These customs “do not allow girls to embrace the world, as they have learned not to be seen.” Tungali mentioned two unusually connected Congolese young women, Gloria (15) and Florence (25), whose favorite Web services are Yahoo, Facebook, Google and Gmail. He says their Internet use is unusual in that even 4th-year female university students heading into the job market don’t typically show a lot of interest in technology.

Which is why, where women in developing countries can find family support for discreet, in-home Internet use on phones, social media can be a means for safe intellectual and social interaction beyond their very limited local spheres of activity.

Filed in Social Media, social media literacy, social media research | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Thoughts on the UK’s debate about online porn

11-May-12

Britain has been having a heated debate about children’s exposure to online pornography, a debate in which even Prime Minister Cameron is participating (see The Guardian). We’ve had our national-level discussions about children’s exposure to adult content on this side of the Atlantic too. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the “decency”-protecting part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act on constitutional grounds. In 2002, we had our first national task force on child online safety, led by the National Research Council and former US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. It issued the milestone “Thornburgh report,” officially titled “Youth, Pornography & the Internet,” with its now-famous swimming pool analogy: “Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All of these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim,” the Thornburgh task force wrote in its report.

That was similar to what Britain’s own education watchdog, Ofsted, reported when it released its 2010 study on filtering in schools: that filters work better when less restrictive and blended with teaching students how to “take responsibility themselves for using new technologies safely” (I quoted the BBC’s coverage in my post on that). But I’m not seeing this cited in British news coverage of the current debate. I wonder if we over here are just as likely to forget the research in times of high emotion.

Does Britain need a task force?

EU Kids Online director and psychology professor Sonia Livingstone, whose research is being cited a lot by tabloids and other “debaters,” says she’s worried about what policies these citers of her work will justify and suggests the problem be given to a “trusted body” already dealing with the issue in other media – such as the UK’s film ratings board or communications regulator Ofcom – because, she writes, “we need strategies that allow for the complexity of the situation, and that’s difficult in a heated debate with strong views on all sides.” We have certainly found that to be true in our society, for example when the highly flawed “Delete Online Predators Act” was drafted in the middle of our predator panic and a mid-term election year, never making it to the Senate before Congress went home for the holidays. The legislation, my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid pointed out, was more about “deleting” social networking from schools and – as social media scholars Henry Jenkins and danah boyd pointed out in 2006 – was so broadly worded that it would’ve blocked a lot more than social network sites at school. It wasn’t about pornography, but it was about the tech issue that consumed an unusual amount of societal attention at the time and led to the creation of the next national task force, at the Berkman Center at Harvard University (more on that in a moment).

“Suppose, for the sake of argument, that MySpace critics are correct and that MySpace is, in fact, exposing large numbers of teens to high-risk situations,” said Dr. Jenkins, referring to what DOPA was somehow supposed to address, “then shouldn’t the role of educational institutions be to help those teens understand those risks and develop strategies for dealing with them?” he asked. “Wouldn’t we be better off having teens engage with MySpace in the context of supervision from knowledgeable and informed adults?” His conclusion: “The proposed federal legislation does nothing to help kids confront the challenges of interacting with online social communities; rather, it allows teachers and librarians to abdicate their responsibility to educate young people about what is becoming a significant aspect of their everyday lives.” His call for guided use of social media rather than the banning of it prefigured Ofsted’s findings four years later. In the schools it rated “outstanding” in online safety practices, the Internet was not “locked down,” and “pupils were helped, from a very early age, to assess the risk of accessing sites,” Ofsted reported.

Factor in young people’s context & views

Wherever Britain’s debate goes and if it’s contagious (we can be sure Russia’s watching because of a filtering law soon to take effect there), I hope policymakers at both household and national levels will have the good sense to push past the viscerally fearful feelings headlines are designed to fuel and work thoughtfully with as well as for young Net users themselves, instead of viewing them as the undifferentiated mass of potential victims they are consistently, thoughtlessly portrayed to be. For example, “children living in disadvantaged or vulnerable circumstances may be ill-served by ‘opt-in’ or even ‘active choice’ solutions,” Livingstone points out, referring to some requirements of Internet service providers being considered by the UK government.

Interestingly, in the US, children’s exposure to online pornography decreased 12% between 2000 and 2010, according to a study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center published in the Journal of Adolescent Health last December (see this).

But the degree of safety a child experiences depends greatly on the child and his or her context. As the Berkman task force (the one that followed the Thornburgh one I mentioned above) pointed out in its 2009 report, “Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies,” a child’s psychosocial makeup and home and school environments are better predictors of online risk than any technology the child uses (or, I’d add, any law requiring it). Youth are not all equally at risk. And really, now that we’re all seeing how much the Internet mirrors so much of human life, there’s a spectrum of risk online, just as offline, suggesting the need for a taxonomy of online safety, from physical and psychological safety to safety of identity, data, and physical property (discussed in our “Online Safety 3.0“). The Berkman task force’s great contribution was a comprehensive review of the youth online risk research through the year it met (2008).

Risk and harm 2 different things

But take away context and psychology for a moment and just consider the notion of risk. Based on EU Kids Online’s surveys of families in 25 countries, Sonia Livingstone offers two insights that I think would be helpful to parents as well as debaters in any public discussion about youth risk online:

  • “‘Risk’ is not the same as ‘harm’: Seeing pornography online may be harmful to children but it may not. It depends on the nature of the images and on the personal circumstances of the child. The minority of vulnerable children may be more at risk of harm from online pornography. Rather more may be more at risk of harm from pornography when it is abusive or degrading to women (or men). But conclusive evidence will always be lacking since we cannot ethically expose a random selection of children to pornography and monitor the outcomes for scientific purposes.
  • “Risk may have positive as well as negative outcomes. For many children, some exposure to some risk is necessary to build resilience. We cannot wrap our children in cotton wool and protect them from the world forever, and we must allow our teenagers to explore their sexuality away from our often-disapproving gaze. But for some children, the same exposure may be harmful – depending on lots of factors, and this contingency – where much depends on the child, the online content, and the circumstances – cannot be avoided.”
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Hanging out ‘on the air’

09-May-12

It gives new meaning to the term “public discussion.” Google has just made it possible for users of Google+ to “broadcast” their Hangouts, USATODAY reports, like Conan O’Brian and Jamie Oliver, PC Magazine reports. In other words, on Google+, anyone can be a “broadcaster” now. “Hangouts on Air differ from normal Hangouts [of up to 10 people] only in that the conversations are recorded,” according to the latter. To make their hangout public, users just launch a hangout as usual (by clicking on “Hangout” in the left-hand column of their main Google+ page, then on the red button that says “Start a Hangout” in the upper-right corner of the Hangout page). Once the hangout’s launched, they just click “Enable Hangouts on Air” (users can also choose to click “Restrict minors from joining the hangout” just below that). Everybody invited to the hangout will be able to see how many viewers their hangout has. Google will ask users if they want to link Hangouts to their YouTube channel. If the answer’s yes, “Google will automatically upload a public recording to a user’s YouTube channel, as well as add a YouTube link to the Google Hangout post in Google+,” PC Magazine adds. [Note how language changes. We used to think of a hangout simply as a place. Now it's both a place and a session – a chunk of time and interaction in that "place."] See also “A Parents’ Guide to Google+” at PlusParents.org, provided by ConnectSafely.

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2012’s ‘most playful’ US cities

08-May-12

This isn’t about technology, but it is about the importance of play, which enhances well-being online and offline. KaBOOM!, a Washington, D.C.-based national non-profit organization “dedicated to saving play,” just announced the 213 US cities that have made the effort “to increase play opportunities for children,” or “Playful Cities.” What Kaboom envisions is “a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America,” and the 213 communities, some of them (cited in that link) recognized for the sixth year in a row, are in 41 states. What are they recognized for, specifically? Here are three examples: Ferguson, Mo., has “Sunday Parkways,” free community play street events on Sunday afternoons which are closed to traffic so residents can play in the street; Houston provides “Love Your Block Grants” for citizens revitalizing neighborhood parks and other city spaces “for quality open space”; and last September in Pico Rivera, Calif., 200 volunteers “rallied together to transform an empty lot into a beautiful playspace using the community-build model” that the city has developed through its community improvement research. [See also this about how play spaces are where people develop the social skills that spell safety as well as enrichment in a networked world.]

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Over a third of US teens videochat: Study

07-May-12

Among US 12-to-17-year-olds, the most avid users of videochat – such as on iChat, Skype, or “hangouts” in Google+ – are also the most avid social networkers, according to just-released data from the Pew Internet Project, indicating to me how integral videochat is becoming to socializing and keeping in touch with friends and family. This study focused on teens, but I have a feeling the numbers are just as high and climbing among whole families with kids in college and extended families spread out geographically.

Pew looked into two other uses of online video too: video recording and uploading, such as 1) producing and sharing do-it-yourself music videos and clips of exploits in videogames or vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube, and 2) live video streaming like what 16-year-old Texas singer Austin Mahone does on Ustream.tv (he has a YouTube channel too). The researchers found that…

  • 37% of online teens videochat, girls (42%) more than boys (at 33%). Age doesn’t make a huge difference: 34% of online 12-to-13-year-olds use video chat and 39% of 14-to-17-year-olds do.
  • At 27%, teens’ video recording and uploading has almost doubled since Pew’s last look at this in 2006, when 14% were doing so. And girls have nearly caught up with boys in this aspect of online video activity. In 2006 the numbers were 19% boys and 10% of girls; now it’s 28% of boys and 26% of girls. With this activity, age makes more of a difference – 30% of teens 14-17 record and upload video, compared to 21% of 12-to-13-year-olds. The researchers add that the numbers suggest cell phone use “does not relate to teens’ likelihood of recording or uploading videos” – 28% of teen cell phone owners share self-produced video while 25% of teens without cell phones do.
  • Only 13% of teens stream live video, with little distinctions by age or gender (13% of boys and 12% of girls), but “social media users are more likely to stream video” than non-social networkers (14% compared to 5%, respectively), Pew says. And interestingly, “other choices that teens make about their online privacy do not relate to their likelihood of streaming video…. there is no statistically significant difference among teens with private, semi-private or public profiles.

As for social media use in general, Pew’s latest: 77% of all teens have cellphones (23% have smartphones) and 97% of those phone owners text; 40% of texting teens videochat compared with 27% of non-texters. More than three-quarters, 77%, of all teens use social sites; 16% use Twitter. Comparing their use of video to non-socialnetworkers, Pew says “teens who use Facebook and Twitter are more likely to use video chat, with 41% of Facebook users chatting (compared with 25% of non-users) and 60% of Twitter users using video chat (compared with 33% of non-Twitter users).”

Filed in Digital Tech, New Media, Video, online video, video sharing, video streaming, videocams, videochat | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Consumer Reports advocates for a law, not so much for consumers

04-May-12

Consumer Reports has a Facebook page, it reports on the third page of its June cover story on privacy in social media. Along with some 900 million other people and organizations around the world who use Facebook, CR apparently derives some benefit from having that page. It also reports that…

  • “Facebook recently partnered with the Department of Labor and others to help connect job seekers and employers, developing systems to make job postings viral.
  • When tornadoes hit the Midwest and Texas this year, photos of animals posted on Facebook helped families find lost pets.
  • The network keeps active-duty soldiers in touch with families, including a National Guardsman serving in Afghanistan who not only reconnected with the woman who later became his wife but now uses it to follow the daily milestones of his newborn daughter.
  • And millions now turn to Facebook to express their opinions to government and businesses, flexing their collective muscle in ways never possible before.”

But all that comes after the “many causes for concern” that represent two pages of disservice, not help, to US consumers. Of course it’s business as usual – the news media report airline crashes, not safe landings, and there are many, many more good things than bad things going on in social media, including in Facebook. Looking at CR’s own data, for example, the watchdog says its survey found that 13 million people don’t use the site’s privacy controls, a scarier-sounding way of saying that only 9% of CR’s estimate of 150 million FB users in the US don’t use them, which means that the vast majority of the site’s users – 91% – do use its privacy controls.

That’s news too. And it’s an important start in the direction of solving the more important issues CR gets to way down in the article: of where our data and government (or law enforcement) and social media intersect; of the importance of controlling what data users’ apps can use (see this) and of what employers, insurers, and the IRS might be able to see in our social-media sharing. That’s more like consumer education.

CR reports that some of the scary causes for concern “arise from poor choices users themselves make” but mentions that “users are treating Facebook more warily; 25% said they falsified information in their profiles to protect their identity.” Does the watchdog get that this indicates they’re getting smarter? Back in 2008, Prof. Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics published a study finding that teens sometimes fictionalize their social network profiles. Why? To protect their privacy! Only real friends know what is and isn’t true. They know what’s displayed in public in social media is often written in “code” that only friends understand and otherwise to be taken with a grain of salt (here’s my post about that). “Wary” is good; it leads to self-regulation and -protection. There’s a progression we’ll be seeing: When news media and so-called consumer advocates stop seeing and representing users merely as potential victims and more as participants and stakeholders in their own and each other’s well-being in social media, “wary” will give way to “strategic.”

Advocating for a law, not for consumers

So why does this cover story start off so negatively? CR tells you: “Consumers Union [its parent] wants a national privacy law.” And why is this a disservice? Because pushing for new laws as solutions all by themselves perpetuates a false dependency at a time when laws are less and less of a solution. I’m remembering Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow saying to participants in the Berkman Center’s symposium on bullying two months ago that, in the context of bullying, “the law is much too flimsy a tool to make a difference.” Bullying behavior is one of the risks children face in social media, and here was a law professor citing the limitations of law where behavior is concerned, whether in the form of cyberbullying online or the offline form of social aggression.

What this article represents is not just a “deep division of opinion,” as CR puts it, but a clash of two very different perspectives – vantage points, not opinions – in a time of major social change. I’m referring to global social change that is represented first in this profound shift we’re experiencing from government-regulated mass media to user-driven social media serving borderless networks-of-people who reside in every country on the planet (I hyphenated that to be sure the focus is on the people who make up those networks not on the networks many of us grew up with, such as NBC, BBC, or other corporate or media networks).

Go with the genie or stay in the bottle

The genie has left the bottle, and the two perspectives are either from within the bottle or moving with the genie. With statements like “US online privacy laws are weaker than those of Europe and much of the world,” Consumer Reports represents the “there ought to be a law” regulatory focus that is becoming more anxious and vocal as individual nations’ laws become less able to regulate the behavior of hundreds of millions of people around the world who are updating their social-network “data” in real time, 24/7.

The fears are understandable. When we’re very used to handling problems in a certain way, we can feel very uneasy and frustrated when the conditions that enable us to fix a problem in the usual way change radically right when we’re trying to address it. And we’re only just beginning to work out together how to protect data privacy in a networked world. But little by little, the other perspective – and it’s not merely that of social media companies – will have more of a voice because it is gradually being shared by more and more people, those who are experiencing more benefits from social media than risks. Like airline passengers who fly in spite of the rare reports of airline crashes. In the online-safety field, I think of the Crimes Against Children Research Center reporting in 2009 that there was “no evidence of predators stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted in social sites,” contrary to what was being reported in the news media and sometimes by youth advocates back then.

Not anti-regulatory, but self- and co-regulatory

The other, outside-the-bottle, perspective is also not anti-regulatory. Rather, it’s watching regulation being redefined and getting more distributed. CR reports that “Facebook and other social networks are changing the way the modern world operates” and, citing Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s words, “‘rewriting the rules’ of social engagement.” Well, exactly. When media are user-driven, users have more of a role – a regulatory role, in fact – in all aspects of their experiences in media. By definition, safety, privacy and reputation management in a social media environment are social – a shared proposition and responsibility, sometimes a negotiation. That’s doesn’t mean that users individually or even collectively are solely responsible for their own privacy or safety. It means users share that responsibility with each other, with the companies that provide those media environments and with the governments charged by their citizens to play a protective role. That could possibly mean more laws but they will have to acknowledge and provide for the self- and co-regulatory roles and rights of users and corporations. This is the real citizenship of a digital age – understanding and acting on the rights and responsibilities of the individuals and entities in both the public and private sectors that are party to the myriad interest communities of this networked world.

Finding the right balance among the three key parties will take some time and effort. Consumer advocates will serve consumers better when they work harder to inform themselves and consumers about what it’s really like out here – with the genie, outside the bottle – and advocate for solutions based on the shared rights and responsibilities of all of this media environment’s regulatory powers: consumers, corporations, and governments.

Disclosure: I serve as co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from Facebook, Google, and other Internet companies.

Related links

Filed in Privacy, Research, consumer privacy, data privacy, media research, privacy education, social media research | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (5) »

Take a survey to help stop ID theft

02-May-12

Our colleagues at the Identity Theft Center study how people use the Web and social media to help everybody figure out how to avoid identity theft and other exploitation (they also provide free victim support). They have a new, very short survey they’d love parents of social media users to take if you have a minute (it’ll actually take less than a minute).

The Center’s last survey found a number of contradictions and a need for more user ID-protection ed but not much bad news social networking’s concerned. For example…

  • Facebook users “still tend to believe that financial harm cannot be caused by Facebook usage.”
  • Although “a large number of those surveyed had been the target of identity theft while using FB – only a small number had actually experienced identity theft as a consequence.”
  • “38% of those surveyed reporting that they were only a little concerned about their Facebook account being taken over”; 34% reported being somewhat concerned; and 27% reported being very concerned.
  • “Although users did not seem to make a direct correlation between Facebook usage and financial identity theft, the majority of them did have unique passwords different from their online financial accounts [which is smart], and most were careful to limit the amount of information they presented to the public.”

As a thank you to survey takers, the ITRC will be giving away $100 prizes to five respondents who complete the survey. Winners will be announced on June 1.

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How Facebook’s fostering organ donation

02-May-12

One way to look at social media is as a global experiment in social action that is unprecedentedly social and spreadable and has nothing to do with geography. It’s a fascinating experiment. The latest “lab” is Facebook’s “Friends Saving Lives” program to support organ donation. Referring in the FB blog today to the “more than 114,000 people in the United States, and millions more around the globe … waiting for the heart, kidney or liver transplant that will save their lives” and the deficit of donors who can meet their need, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg cited medical experts as saying that “broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis.” They added that “we believe that by simply telling people that you’re an organ donor, the power of sharing and connection can play an important role.” So FB has enabled its users to show on their profiles (FB’s new term is now “timelines”) if they’re organ donors and “share you story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. If you’re not already registered with your state or national registry and want to be.” The site includes a link to the official donor registry nearest that user. My ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid has step-by-step instructions in his blog post at Forbes.com, and here’s FB’s video tutorial on YouTube.

Other examples of just the FB part of this social-action experiment helped tornado and tsunami survivors in Missouri and Japan, respectively. As Zuckerberg and Sandberg put it, in Missouri, users “tracked down and returned treasured mementos to families who thought they’d lost everything in the Joplin tornado” and in Japan, “people used Facebook to locate family and friends following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Smaller acts of kindness happen millions of times a day on Facebook.”

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