Anne Collier’s Bio
Editor of NetFamilyNews.org and founder and executive director of its parent organization, Net Family News, Inc., Anne is a writer and youth advocate who has worked in the news media since 1980. With SafeKids.com‘s Larry Magid, she co-directs ConnectSafely.org, a Web-based resource for parents, educators, and everybody interested in the impact of the fixed and mobile social Web on youth and vice versa.
Anne is currently serving on the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning & the Internet. In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group supporting the launch of the Born This Way Foundation, at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, and helped form its Youth Advisory Board. In conjunction with the Foundation’s launch, she collaborated on several papers of the Berkman Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. In 2011, Anne contributed a chapter to Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, June 2011), edited by Profs. Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja of the Cyberbullying Research Center. With Larry Magid, she co-authored A Parents’ Guide to Facebook (FBparents.org, 2012) and MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking (Peachpit Press, 2006).
In 2009-’10, Anne served as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which in June 2010 delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” a subject on which Anne frequently speaks. In 2008, she served on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, formed by 49 state attorneys general and Fox Interactive/MySpace and based at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She has appeared on PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” (2008), been heard on public radio and nationally syndicated commercial radio in many states, and been quoted in the New York Times, Business Week, the Associated Press, and many other print outlets.
Anne currently serves on Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board and the advisory boards of the London- and Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute and GetNetWise.org, a project of the Washington-based Internet Education Foundation. She founded the nonprofit Net Family News in 1999 on the premise that information empowers parents at a time when kids’ tech interests have become a key part of parenting. NetFamilyNews.org (“kid-tech news for parents”) is a blog, RSS feed, and email newsletter with subscribers in more than 50 countries. Anne worked on print, radio, TV, and Web versions of the Christian Science Monitor, served as an editor in consumer magazines, and has written for Microsoft’s Staysafe.org, GetNetWise.org, Children’s Technology Review, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s NetSmartz.org.
A Massachusetts native, Anne holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Principia College and the University of Chicago and lives with her family in San Jose, California.
