When does texting get unhealthy?

The teen texting rate keeps climbing. US teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008, the New York Times reports, citing Nielsen figures. That's "almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier." The Times cites one psychotherapist as saying that adolescents' huge interest in what's going on with peers plus huge anxiety about being out of the loop spell the potential for "great benefit and great harm" from excessive texting. Other healthcare professionals pointed to potential "anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation." As interesting to me, if not more, were comments from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, who wonders whether all the texting allows teens the "peace and quiet" they need to do their jobs as adolescents: separate from their parents and figure out who they are and will be. Turkle makes two other important points: that parents often don't set the right example with their cellphone use, and adolescence is a time when people need the kind of undivided attention from their parents that cellphone-addicted parents aren't giving them. "I believe the 'cure' doesn't lie so much in hand-wringing or policing usage as much as it does in having honest dialogues about the scientific and emotional side effects of tech dependence as experienced by both generations," writes Ypulse managing editor Meredith Sires in response to the Times piece. Well put. See also "'Continuous partial attention...'."

Teens' nude photo-sharing in NH

New Hampshire is the latest state where there have been reports of teens passing around via cellphones nude photos of peers. "Students at Salem High School were allegedly circulating graphic photos of fellow, underage female students among themselves via cell phone, prompting a police investigation," the New Hampshire Union Leader reports. Police said photos of at least two girls were disseminated by both boys and girls to a "significant number of students" but not throughout the entire student body of 2,300. The Caledonian Record later reported that "police, prosecutors and school officials ... are warning students that ... taking, possessing and distributing explicit pictures of children is a crime." The school held an assembly Monday night to inform students that the photos constituted "pornography," the Eagle-Tribune reported, leaving "at least one parent" upset that it did more to spread rumors than provide facts. For stories in other states about this trend, see "Naked photo-sharing trend" and "Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there."

Mobile parenting

I especially liked Nos. 4 and 6 in Marian Merritt's blog post about how parents can help their kids keep mobile phone use safe and affordable. If you use cellphone parental controls (she speaks to those, and I wrote about them last May here), "tell your child you are installing and using parental controls and show them the details on what you'll be limiting." She adds that this is not the time to be spying on your child." I agree, for the simple reason that, if you did monitor them surreptitiously and found something untoward, you'd have to talk with them anyway, and then it'd be really hard to keep anger and communication breakdown at bay. There is one exception, though: If your child is spending an unusual amount of time online and is being secretive and uncommunicative, monitoring software might be justified to ensure s/he's not at risk. For more on mobile parenting, see our "Cellphone Safety Tips" at ConnectSafely.org. A couple of other posts on the subject: "Teen uber-texters" and "Cellphone etiquette."

MySpace ever more mobile

Trying to block MySpace at school (or home or anywhere) is getting harder, since...

1. "For teens, the future is mobile," CNET reports, and
2. MySpace (not to mention other social sites) is getting increasingly mobile.

MySpace just announced its new social-networking app for the iPhone (available free in iPhone's App Store), Internet News reports. With it, iPhone users can "search the network and add friends, compose and delete mail, and send bulletin blasts to all their friends [in 12 languages so far]. It will also offer the ability to upload and share pictures" and music. MySpace is also available on Helio phones, the T-Mobile Sidekick and other AT&T phones - not to mention its deals so far with 27 carriers in 20 countries offering m.myspace.com (MySpace tailored just for those little mobile screens). MediaPost says games and social networking "lead the way" in the App Store, now with 500 applications in it. And social networking on phones is only just taking off - ITbusiness.ca calls mobile social networking a "goldmine of untapped business opportunities." So, for youth, filtering workarounds are getting easier by the moment. As my tech educator friend Anne Bubnic wrote, this is "another good reason we need to focus on digital citizenship rather than block sites - kind of like trying to block out fresh air when it’s all around you, anyway." Parents might consider setting parental controls on kids' iPhones themselves, though, since 6 out of 10 of the most popular apps named by a site that rates iPhone apps (which was pointed out by a reader and to which NetFamilyNews can't ethically link) are selling porn. For a mobile social-networking reality check, a study in the UK, where youth mobile phone use is even higher than in the US, found that "only 24% of Internet users access social-networking sites with a mobile phone," mocoNews.net reports.

GPS: Matching ads to phone users

"We’re in the midst of a boom in devices that show where people are at any point in time," the New York Times reports. The devices - cellphones, mostly - not only show people where people are (as in parents tracking kids) but also show advertisers where people are. In effect. Cellphone users can opt to allow the information about their location to inform software in the phone what advertising would be relevant to the user at that moment. Groups have raised consumer privacy issues, and providers of the ad-targeting software (at least some of them) seem to be factoring those concerns into it. With one such product, CitySense, users opt in (e.g., for ads that tell them where everybody's going for pizza or music near them) - and "opt in" means it isn't there by default - to the service and "if they want to purge their data, they can do so at any time," according to the Times.

CT students shared nude photos

In yet another state, middle and high school students in Westport, Connecticut, "have been sharing nude pictures of themselves electronically, the school district's superintendent told parents this week." The Greenwich (Conn.) Time reported that Superintendent Elliott Landon wrote in a letter to parents that the photos had been sent to "countless people" in and beyond Westport. He said "electronic transmission, or receipt of sexually explicit or pornographic material in which students are engaged 'when discovered, will be addressed through the criminal justice system'." The article doesn't say if the photos had been shared via Web or cellphones, but the superintendent suggested that parents monitor their kids' use of both. So far I've seen reports of this trend in at least nine states (see this about those).

What mobile carriers need to do for kids

US cellphone companies have made impressive headway with parental controls lately. That's great in terms of preventive measures, but this country's mobile industry has quite a ways to go, compared with those of some other countries, on support for kids and families after bad stuff happens.

I'll tell you what I mean in a moment, but first here is what's in place right now. According to the mobile industry's Wireless Foundation, all the major carriers - Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless - offer:

The ability to turn off Web access on children's phones (under a parent's account)

If Web access is allowed, basic filtering, as well as blocking of phone-based purchases at no extra cost

The ability to turn off text messaging on kids' phones, or "sub-accounts"

The ability to block text messages or phone calls from specific numbers on some of the phones each carrier offers

The ability to monitor kids' minutes and text messages (the bills they're running up) via the carriers' Web sites

The ability to limit the times of day children can use their phones (in some cases at additional charge).

So why is technology not enough? Because for the same reason tech controls on a single computer are no longer by themselves enough protection on the everywhere, anytime, user-driven, multimedia, multi-device fixed and mobile social Web, tech controls aren't enough on phones. Certainly technology can be a help on any platform - like bandaids in a family First Aid kit - but kids find workarounds both technical and non-technical, including using their friends' phones and accounts.

Even more key is that - for young people - devices are just means to an end. Socializing is the focus, not its enablers. Solution development increasingly has to be as holistic, cross-platform, and collaborative as the "problem." And what ultimately protects the vast majority of teens is the software between their ears, with parents providing backup.

No matter how much support and good sense they have, however, teens take risks - because risk assessment, child development experts say, is a primary task of adolescence, along with personal and social identity exploration. In the midst of all that, sometimes things come up, and those things most frequently fall in the huge gray area that is noncriminal and beyond the scope of law enforcement, as much as law enforcement needs to be in the mix.

One example of behavior in this gray area is peer harassment, often called cyberbullying (a term that's less than meaningful to teens - see this). It has been happening a lot on phones, longer in other countries. In the UK, "bullying" is the single biggest issue mobile companies get abuse reports about concerning kids, a colleague there told me. Britain's major carriers have worked on this a lot, and one of them, O2, has a team of more than 100 staff people specifically trained to deal with bullying and other children's phone abuse issues. Vodafone has done a lot of work in this area too.

In New Zealand, I recently spent an afternoon at NetSafe, the country's premier online-safety organization. NetSafe works with New Zealand's two major carriers, Vodafone NZ and NZ Telecom, which have customer-service staff trained to detect and send these gray-area issues on to NetSafe for quick dispatch to the expertise most appropriate for each case. This approach illustrates the "holistic, cross-platform, collaborative" approach I mention above: NetSafe works with young people, parents, educators, legal advisers, law enforcement, psychologists, and policymakers; these people know that solutions to cyberbullying, domestic violence, nude photo-sharing, teacher defamation, or any problem kids experience almost always requires more than one skill set to work through.

This is the kind of support - customizable, holistic, collaborative, and remedial as well as preemptive - that is most realistic for young people whose everyday lives are increasingly blended with technology. Social-networking services have already implemented, have *had* to implement, measures with those characteristics: preemptive ones such as consumer education, PSAs, and training videos for parents; reactive, back-office ones such as customer-service staff trained for child protection, dedicated helplines for educators and law enforcement, and dedicated customer service for parents; and collaborative ones such as lobbying for more effective legislation and developing technology for law enforcement. Now the mobile carriers need to too. Not that I'm singling them out: Online games, gaming communities, and virtual worlds are on the next frontier for kid-tech safety.

Related links

The Federal Trade Commission has been looking into what sorts of rules and regs there might need to be to protect kids on cellphones, Internet News reports - from whether there should even be ads (around premium services such as wallpapers and ringtones) aimed at youth to age challenges for people making transactions with their phones. On the latter, right now kids could just lie when a screen pops up requesting their age, so the wireless industry is looking into technology like that on the Web where a "cookie" installed on a site visitor's computer can stop a user who is denied entry from going back and entering a different age.

"Students cautioned to avoid cell phone, Web pitfalls" in the Minneapolis area's Pioneer Press

In the UK, "21 million UK mobile phone subscribers - of a total of almost 48 million - belong to a social-networking site. Out of this 21 million around 5 million" people use their phones to access their social-networking profiles at least once a month, The Guardian reports.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the range of parental-control features available from both carriers and third-party providers.

Check out the newest plague in the pipeline for mobile users - text spam on phones. The New York Times reports.

See how far we've come: I first wrote about parental controls on phones back in 2004.

Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there

In response to my feature "Naked photo-sharing trend," "Marcia" in New Jersey emailed me about her own daughter's extremely difficult experience with sharing a photo of herself. With Marcia's permission, I sent her story and question about it to psychiatrist Jerald Block in Oregon and Det. Frank Dannahey, a youth division officer in Connecticut and with everybody's permission (for privacy protection, "Marcia" is not her real name), I'm sharing their perspectives here....

"Just recently my 14-year-old daughter, a freshman in high school, sent a nude picture of herself to a boy who sent it to someone else, then a few girls got it and proceeded to send it everywhere. This was a total shock of course that my daughter would take a picture, but trying to be an understanding parent in this world, I listened carefully and stayed calm. She said that the boy bugged her and bugged her until she could not take it anymore. The school is trying to handle this.... My daughter went to a counselor at school and talked about it. She does not know why she did it but my feeling is the boy egged her on until she felt she had to, and now she knows she never should feel like she is being controlled by somebody.

"My question is, even though it is going to be hard for her to go back to school, the school is telling me that it is best for her and I think it is best that she just not talk about it with anyone. But I feel that these kids that have been spreading this around should realize that it is a "criminal act" and that is where I stand now and don't know how to approach it. I don't want to take anyone to court and she is suffering enough from her own mistake - I want her to be able to get back to her life and enjoy it. She knows she made a stupid mistake and she has to live with that. Also, her picture did not have her face at all in it, but the girls who sent it around made sure they put her name on it. This was all done by cell phone, not on the Internet."

Detective Dannahey:

"Wow, this 'power of control' seems identical to my case and what the teen involved told me. As far as the criminal side of this, there are a few problems concerning the 'child porn' aspect. I notice that the mom said that her child’s face does not appear in the photo. If this case was to come into my office, the first thing we would have to try doing is to determine 1) if we could prove the photo was of that specific child and 2) if we could not prove that it was in fact that specific child, could we prove that it is a photo of a minor. I have had several cases of this type. In some cases you can use the background in the photo to prove that it was taken in the child’s home, which could be helpful in proving that it is a specific child. If a photo is very clear in detail we might be able to prove who's in the photo by birthmarks, marks on the body, etc. You can also use the file data from the photo to at least give you a time period of when the photo was taken and in this case data from the phone where it was taken from. Lastly, we have taken a child’s photos to a physician who is recognized as a court expert in the area of child exploitation and, based on the child’s development, he or she *might* be able to make a convincing case that the child in the photo is a minor. Would every police department go this far? Maybe not.

"I would say that in this case, you would have a criminal violation in the fact that a group of teens is circulating a nude photo, supposedly of a specific minor, and attaching a name to the photo as being a specific person. This action would obviously cause alarm and humiliation to a teen. In this case, you may or may not prove the 'child porn' aspect of it, but you would certainly have a charge relating to the alarm and humiliation factor. That exact charge would differ from state to state. I know this sounds a little complicated... The fact that this child’s face does not appear in the photo severely complicates this case."

Dr. Block:

"This is a complex and surprisingly common occurrence. I can imagine two different strategies: (1) just wait it out, or (2) notify the police. Transferring the photo is a serious federal crime, so perhaps a police officer would be willing to address the school and educate them at the same time. However, if anyone actually got into trouble, the backlash against the girl might be terrible. Also, by bringing in the police, the issue is prolonged and cemented into the minds of her classmates. Finally, there may be some legal risk to the girl herself. An aggressive prosecutor could come after her (see this). I'd consult a lawyer, then, before talking to the police.

"So, if it were my child, I probably would be inclined to 'do nothing' and let it blow over. However, I would send the daughter to see a therapist so that she would have a safe place to discuss and think through the harassment, which is awfully shaming and painful. Also, I would leave the decision about whether to involve the police or not to her. Giving her that decision (in the context of therapy, where it can be thought through carefully), might give her a greater sense of control over the situation. What a difficult position to be in, as a child or parent."

Related links

In addition to cases this year in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Georgia (see this item) - as well as the New Jersey one above that may not become a case - three recent reports in the nude photo-sharing trend:

Wisconsin: Two 17-year-old Hudson, Wisc., boys "were charged with misdemeanors for being party to defamation of character in the April 1 incident, which started when a girl used her cell phone to send nude pictures of herself to male friends" - by the Associated Press in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Ohio: "Trading Nude Photos Via Mobile Phone Now Part of Teen Dating, Experts Say" - story about teens in Columbus from the Associated Press at FoxNews.com

Utah: "Cell phone nudes" - A 15-year-old Farmington, Utah, boy is charged "one felony count of dealing material harmful to a minor, and three misdemeanor lewdness counts. The charges come in the wake of a growing trend among Utah teenagers who trade nude photos of themselves over cell phones." Archived at the Salt Lake Tribune.

More recently two stories from New York and Minnesota, and later an AP article referring to other cases in Alabama, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Texas....

Minnesota: Students cautioned to avoid cellphone, Web pitfalls" in the Pioneer Press

New York: "Pioneer School District finds nude photos on students cellphones" in the Buffalo News

Phones more & more for media-sharing

This was a big week for the mobile phone industry, at least the US one, because of CTIA, the industry's huge trade show. And the biggest story, according to the New York Times, was competition for Apple's iPhone, as touchscreens, Web browsers, and multimedia features appear on more and more cellphones - together! Like the iPhone, these are really becoming media players + mini-computers, as well as communications devices. These little devices are so fun to play and work with - of course for teens too, the earliest adopters (or wannabes) - but it's good to keep in mind that they're also very avid photo- and video-sharers, as well as texters on phones, and there are both upsides and downsides to all this phone-based socializing and media-sharing. Last year, I cited an M:Metrics study finding that 70% of 13-to-17-year-old cellphone users in Europe and the US are creating and sharing content on their phones, photo-sharing being the No. 1 activity. Italian teens lead the way as phone media producers, followed by teens in Spain and the UK (tied for 2nd), then France, Germany, and the US, respectively (see this item). But the US is catching up, and among the positives, we're seeing some negative trends (see "Staging fights for Web video-sharing" and "Naked photo-sharing trend").

Naked photo-sharing trend: Police perspective

This is a trend deserving parents' and, for that matter, everyone else's attention - especially teens'. The Associated Press report of Utah middle-schoolers taking and sending nude photos on their cellphones joins similar reports from Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Georgia in the past few months. And in 2007 the child-porn-distribution convictions of two Florida teens were upheld in a state appeals court (they'd taken sexually explicit photos of themselves and sent them to the boy's personal email account).

In the Utah case, the prosecutor told the AP that police expect to see more cases like this - they were in fact dealing with "several other similar unrelated cases" - and he is not alone in his struggle to figure out how to handle cases involving teens distributing photos that in effect constitute child pornography depicting themselves and their peers. They cover a full range of behavior, from impulsive to developmentally fairly normal adolescent risk assessment to outright harassment and bullying. For example, here's what investigators discovered in the Georgia case, as reported by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children:

"Some girls were peer-pressured into taking inappropriate images of themselves and sending them to the boys. Others complied with the boys’ requests for pictures because they had crushes on the boys. Many of the girls suffered from low self-esteem or did not understand the seriousness of the situation because 'everybody is doing it.' Few realized their images were being circulated throughout the school and, in one case, traded with a suspect in the United Kingdom. In another case, one of the boys was charging students at the school $25 to view graphic images of one of the female victims. As of this writing, investigators have tracked down hundreds of images, and at least one video, involving these victims." [A partial report is under the second heading on this page at NCMEC.org.]

It's important for teens and parents to know that these cases, which could technically be treated as federal felonies (child-porn distribution), are posing a real challenge to prosecutors. Det. Frank Dannahey, a youth officer in Connecticut for 17 years, agrees that this is a growing problem. A member of our Advisory Board, he emailed me last week in reference to my item on the Alabama case (and kindly gave me permission to publish his email, which describes a local case that struck him and offers teens some things to consider if they're ever tempted to share intimate photos online or on phones):

"I have to agree that it would not be in the best interest of the kids to have them charged with a federal crime," Detective Dannahey wrote. "I really don’t believe they understand the implications of what they are doing. You and I have been talking about this topic for a long time [see his description of a 13-year-old Connecticut girl's ordeal in "Teen photos and a police officer's story," January 2006].

"I can’t tell you how many of these cases I have had to deal with or assist other agencies with," he continued. "The long-term implications for these kids can be serious - not to mention the initial humiliation and embarrassment. I see these photos becoming an instrument in online bullying/harassment.

"I just recently closed a case in which a middle school girl shared nude photos of herself to males she met through IM sessions. In a different twist, the girl told me that she gave them (sent) the photos after being 'intimidated' online by the boys," he wrote. "This is a very shy girl one would not expect to do this sort of thing. The girl told me that the boys she communicated with had a sort of 'power' over her in manipulating her to do something that she never thought she could do [which sounds to me like the Georgia case]. She was highly embarrassed by it. This was something that I had not heard before. When kids do this sort of thing it is usually meant to be a private thing between boyfriends/girlfriends. Of course we all know that teen love doesn’t last forever and, when the breakup happens, these types of photos get 'out there.' This is certainly an issue that I address in programs with parents and teens.

"In cases where a teen sends a 'private' photo to someone and it ends up being leaked to other people, the teen’s question to me is always the same - will anyone else see the image? Unfortunately, my answer to that question is always the same: 'I don’t know'," Dannahey continued. "Years ago, if a paper photo was taken from someone, they could possibly get it back, rip it up, and destroy the negative. Today in the digital age, getting a photo back that has been sent electronically is difficult at best and more likely improbable.

"I will usually tell teens the following when considering the sending of 'private' digital photos/videos to people online: Because digital media is so easily shared and reproduced, you need to consider several things before hitting the Send button:

"Are you willing to take the chance that someone other than your intended recipient will see your images?

"Will those images be a source of embarrassment or humiliation to you?

"Are you willing to take the chance that the images may be a 'career killer' or prevent you from some future opportunity?

"Will the images/videos that you send violate the law?"

Readers, if anything like this has come up at your house or school, please share your experiences - or post them in our forum at ConnectSafely.org. Thank you! Fellow parents or educators can benefit from your experience.