Anne Collier’s Bio
Editor of NetFamilyNews.org and founder and executive director of 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 has served on three national task forces on youth and Internet safety, including as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” in June 2010, and the Harvard Berkman Center’s national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008. Most recently she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force for Learning & the Internet of 2013-’14. 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 first Youth Advisory Board. In conjunction with the Foundation’s launch, she collaborated on several papers for the Foundation and Berkman Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. Anne has contributed chapters to Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents (Oxford Press, 2014) and Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). With Larry Magid, she co-authored MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking (Peachpit Press, 2006), and they have since co-authored a number of social media guides for parents.
Anne has spoken widely on Internet safety myth-busting, the digital age literacies and digital citizenship, appeared on PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” (2008), has been heard on public radio and nationally syndicated commercial radio in many states, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Business Week, the Associated Press, and many other print outlets.
She 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.
