Age verification: An attorney general's concern

The headline chosen by the European Commission's QuickLinks blog certainly cuts to the chase: "No Adults Allowed. (Marketers Welcome)." What it links to is a timely New York Times piece about the potential unintended consequences of the age verification that state attorneys general are calling for (consequences that would not please many parents). What the headline refers to is the alleged business model of some of the 2 dozen+ companies who want to help (and involve US schools in helping) verify American children's ages - apparently for the purpose of protecting them online but also reportedly to make a business out of selling data they gather on kids to marketers. Kids' social sites, virtual worlds, and other services would pay the age-verification vendor a "commission for each [child] member" a school signs up; "the [kids'] Web site can then use the data on each child to tailor its advertising," the Times reports. One of the age-verification companies the Times talked to, eGuardian, says kids are exposed to ads anyway (well, in some, not all, kids' sites), it just makes sure they're appropriate. The question is, how can that "appropriate advertising" be guaranteed? There's a pretty sexualized media culture and a lot of obesity in this society anyway, to name only a couple of issues. One of the remarkable things about this piece is the quote at the bottom from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a leading proponent of age verification, saying that verifying kids' ages online to promote marketing to them would be very concerning. This is the first qualifying statement about age verification we've seen from the attorneys general since they started calling for its implementation more than two years ago.

E-coupons new in the UK

Family coupon clippers may be interested in this news. The British just got coupons - digital ones, that is. Only they're not called coupons across the pond. These are called e-vouchers. The VoucherCodes site says users can "simply enter a code into the checkout of participating [online] stores to receive an instant discount." You probably already know of some US ones: e.g., RetailMeNot.com, UltimateCoupons.com, CoolSavings.com, FatWallet.com, etc., etc.

Targeted Web ads & critical thinking

"Behavioral targeting," believe it or not, could be a great topic for family discussion. Sounds like a big, nasty sociological term, but it's really about critical thinking, or knowing how others might be trying to manipulate us. When teens are wise to that, they know how to protect themselves from manipulation. Anyway, behavioral targeting is quite likely happening to Web users at your house, and the Federal Trade Commission is actually looking into it, the Washington Post reports. Here's what it is, very basically: Internet companies tracking people's Web search behavior and visits to special-interest Web sites in order to target them with ads (read the article to see exactly how with people planning weddings). Here are the two sides of the debate: "while public interest groups argue that compiling profiles of largely unsuspecting Internet users ought to be illegal, online advertisers and publishers respond that their ad targeting tactics protect privacy and may be essential to support the free content on the Web." Indeed, there is money in it, as highly targeted audiences (aka those mostly likely to make purchases) are very valuable to sellers. [See also "How social influencing works."]

Positive spin, social Web-style

Instead of "don't try this at home," this is more along the lines of "don't try this at work" - universities and other organizations trying to attract youth with videos on YouTube. It's tricky. For one thing, they kind of need to do this to counteract some of the less-than-savory images of schools being uploaded to YouTube and other video-sharing sites by the students at those schools - images of students engaging in various forms of school-policy violation, for example. In effect, schools are following the advice of experts on reputation management online: get proactive, put up a positive presentation of yourself so that what the search engines index will be what you say about yourself and not what others put up about you that's not so nice. The problem is, slick and 100% positive marketing videos by organizations are generally not what attract the big traffic numbers at YouTube (that's an understatement). In other words, as the Washington Post puts it, "like a parent trying to seem cool, sometimes the efforts are painful to watch." But wait, there's hope. Some schools are being smart, as for example, in "sponsoring contests urging students to create videos that show what they love about the school." Check out the article for more examples.