Friday, November 21, 2008
Europe on age verification, social networking
Reports on those stakeholders' 70+ comments were presented at the EC's Safer Internet Forum in September. Here are the EC's conclusions on social networking and age verification, two subjects of particular interest to the US's state attorneys general and the ISTTF (so I'm zooming in on these two):
1. Summary of European views on age verification
2. Conclusions from report on social networking
Related links
Labels: age verification, global social networking, ISTTF
Monday, November 17, 2008
Age verification: An attorney general's concern
Labels: age verification, Blumenthal, Brad Stone, online marketing, online safety education
Friday, October 10, 2008
Online ID verification in South Korea
Labels: age verification, online identity, South Korea
Friday, September 26, 2008
The ISTTF: Chicken or egg?
The problem is, we now know - via a growing body of research - that young people's use of technology for socializing is not limited to MySpace, to social networking in general, or even to the Web. Youth don't even focus on what technology or device (phone, chat, blogs, IM, Skype, computer, Xbox Live, Club Penguin, World of Warcraft, etc.) they use when they're socializing. They just communicate, produce, and socialize. So the "problem" is not technology. We're dealing with behavior, learning, adolescent development, social norm development, and identity formation, here. What technology is going to give adults (those who want it) control over that, or somehow sequester American youth into American sites that are compelled to verify ages, or separate adults and children across the entire universe of increasingly mobile, device-agnostic communications, media-sharing, and social activity?
Besides, we also know now that only a tiny percentage - well under 1% - of US youth are at risk of being victimized by the kinds of crimes the attorneys general put the Task Force together for, and this minority is, unfortunately, already at risk in "real life." Technology probably doesn't have much of a chance at curing the age-old struggles of troubled youth - certainly not ID verification technology.
The other thing we know, though we adults don't think about it a whole lot, is that the "problem" is changing - fast (it actually won't be that long before our teenagers are parents!). Because nobody's brains are fully developed till their early 20s, teens need our input, but so do we need theirs. For the most part, youth understand what's happening with tech and the social Web, they're the drivers of it, they're changing (growing up), and technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it, so we don't have anything close to a static "problem" to get a fix on, much less to fix.
Which leads me to the chicken/egg question. The first day we heard at least a dozen presentations by purveyors of various technologies, many of them focused on verifying either ages (very hard with US minors, who under federal privacy law have very little verifiable personal information in public records) or identities. By the end of the day I couldn't shake off the unnerving picture of a roomful of baby boomers (digital non-natives, including me) - many of whom barely understand the "problem," much less the full picture of young social Web participants, and some of whom stand to gain a great deal from selling the Task Force on a particular technology for nationwide adoption - trying to assert control over the unruly social Web. The understanding is growing, not least because the Task Force has a research advisory board as well as a technical one, and the former is right now completing a review of all research on youth online safety to date - the first of its kind. This is brilliant! So what's wrong with this picture? Seems to me the research comes first, then - as we understand the problem - we begin to look at what the solutions should be.
The second day we heard from a Rochester Institute of Technology sociology professor with a background in law enforcement. It's an important study (I'll blog about it more next week) because it looks at Internet use by more than 40,000 Rochester-area students all the way from kindergarten up through 12th grade, and it offered the Task Force insights into the peer-on-peer, noncriminal but negative and sometimes unethical and illegal side of the online-safety question. But youth were referred to in an extremely negative adversarial way, first- and second-graders referred to as "perpetrators" and "offenders." For example, the "four types" of middle-school "online offenders," he said, are "generalists, pirates, academic cheaters, and deceiving bullies." As useful as the data is, I don't feel this is productive language to use when trying to change behavior or inspire children about digital citizenship (see my description of an amazing such project at Bel Aire Elementary School in Tiburon, Calif., here).
So there you have one person's (rambling) perspective. There are others available now - that of Adam Thierer of the Washington, DC-based Progress & Freedom Foundation and a more radical one from CNET blogger and Berkman fellow Chris Soghoian. [The Task Force is hosted and chaired by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.]
Your views are always welcome - in our forum here, posted in this blog, or via anne[at]netfamilynews.org. With your permission, I love to publish your views for the benefit of all readers.
Labels: age verification, attorneys general, Berkman Center, college social networking, ISTTF, MySpace
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Microsoft's age-verification concept
Labels: age verification, authentication, identity, online identity
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Data insecurity on the rise
Labels: age verification, computer security
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
UK data security breach & kids
Labels: age verification, identity theft, privacy
Friday, October 26, 2007
Social networker age verification revisited
And then what would the result be? "The consequences of successful age verification, meanwhile, would be even worse," the FT continues. "Minors would be driven off mainstream sites such as MySpace and Facebook and on to unaccountable offshore alternatives or the chaos of newsgroups," which we tell parents all the time - because kids are experts at finding workarounds. "There they would be far more vulnerable than on MySpace, which now makes efforts to keep tabs on its users." In other words, parents probably want their kids in sites that have customer service departments that actually respond to abuse reports and parents' complaints. MySpace has an email address just for parents (parentcare@myspace.com), as well as ones for educators and law enforcement. [For more on age verification, see a blog post from Adam Thierer of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, complete with a podcast he did with other experts on the issue. The FT also this week published a summary on where social-networking sites, attorneys general, and all the rest of are on all this.]
Labels: age verification
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Can online kids be verified?
Labels: age verification, social networking
Friday, May 11, 2007
State laws on age verification
Labels: age verification, mobile social networking, online safety
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