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April 11, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this first full week of April:


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COPPA's birthday: Reality check on kids' privacy and safety online

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is three years old this month, and the law is getting increasing support from kids themselves. When COPPA went into effect, 54% of US 13-to-15-year-olds and 15% of 16-to-17-year-olds thought there should be a law about how companies use the information they collect from young people, according to just-released Harris Interactive research (downloadable here in pdf format. This year, 69% and 72%, respectively, feel that way. Only 8% and 3%, respectively, feel no such law should exist.

Interestingly, Harris also found that its youngest respondents - those under 13 - "have become less fearful" of giving out their personal information online since COPPA, though Harris adds that many do remain worried about doing so. All told, privacy is of greater concern to teens than to tweens (9-to-12-year-olds). In response to Harris's statement, "I am worried about giving out personal information on the Web," 37% of 8-to-9-year-olds agreed and, for older age groups, that figure was 55% (kids 10-12), 62% (teens 13-15), and 52% (teens 16-17).

Here are other key, in some cases chilling, findings from Harris Interactive for 2003 (% of those who agreed with the following statements):


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A subscriber writes: Google & kids' privacy

Subscriber, police detective, and Net safety consultant Bob Williams in Connecticut emailed us the other day about something parents will want to know about Google, the most popular search engine. Bob writes:

"During one of my 'Internet Safety for Children' presentations for parents, I was advised of a dilemma that involved the Google search engine and telephone numbers.

"When an Internet user goes to www.google.com and enters a 10-digit telephone number (i.e. the user's home phone number) in the search box, his personal information will appear (unless the phone number is unlisted). Then the user is provided an opportunity to click onto directions to the location [of that phone number]. This is a reminder of how easily a child predator can make contact with targets on the Internet - especially if a child completes a 'profile' and enters personal information."

Editor's note: Bob's underscoring the importance of making sure children never give out phone numbers in online profiles, chatrooms, or anywhere else. Profiles are those personal descriptions people are asked to fill out so that, when they participate in chat or instant-messaging, people they're chatting with can click on their screen name, go to their profile, and find out all about them. Even less obviously identifying information - such as gender or their favorite local hangout - is used by pedophiles to "groom" (develop a relationship with) targeted children, usually through many online conversations over extended periods of time. We appreciate this and any tips subscribers send us! The address, of course, is feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Web News Briefs

  1. US Congress passes major child-protection bill

    House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) of Texas called it "the most comprehensive child protection legislation this House has ever passed," Reuters reports. Representative DeLay was referring to the PROTECT Act passed by Congress late Thursday ("PROTECT" is short for Prosecutorial Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of Children Today). "A product of a House-Senate compromise, the House passed the bill by a lopsided 400-25 vote, and the Senate later approved it 98-0," according to Reuters. President Bush is expected to sign it. The law would strengthen penalties for pedophiles, fund a national AMBER Alert system to recover kidnapped children, give jail time to online pornographers who hide their sites behind misspelled Web addresses, and bolster child-pornography prohibitions, according to the Washington Post. The Reuters report adds that the law "defines depictions of underage sex as obscenity, "stripping it of many free-speech protections." Here are the Associated Press's coverage and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's press release on the bill's passage.

  2. Record companies sue student file-swappers

    The recording industry's trade association has opened a new front in its fight against music piracy: college campuses (Wired News calls this latest lawsuit the RIAA's version of "shock and awe" battle tactics). The RIAA is suing to shut down the file-sharing systems of four students at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan Technological University, the Washington Post reports (the Napster-like file-sharing services reside on those universities' networks). "The suits also ask for the highest damages allowable by law, which range up to $150,000 per copyright infringement or, in other words, per pirated song," according to the Post, adding that the students could face millions of dollars in damages if the court agrees with the RIAA.

    CNET's coverage provides a helpful description for parents of what constitutes this particular "threat" to the recording industry. According to the article, what the RIAA is complaining about is three software programs the students use which it compares to the now-defunct Napster: "Phynd," "Flatlan," and "Direct Connect." The RIAA calls them "local-area Napster networks," but they're not that much like Napster, CNET says. Direct Connect is closest, "allowing users to connect to a central server, search one another's hard drives, and download files from one another." Flatlan "lets a student set up a search engine - often on an ordinary dorm room PC - that scours all computers connected to a campus network that have Windows file-sharing turned on. Unlike Napster or Kazaa, which helped create a network of computers that would not have existed otherwise, Flatlan searches a network that already exists. Phynd is a generic search engine technology that lets users configure it to search whatever they want, including FTP sites, Web sites, or local files such as those found on a college network."

    USAToday has college students' fearless, if not defiant, reaction to news of the RIAA's lawsuit. As for other undergrad Net activities, some are lucrative. Here's the Business Journal (in North Carolina) on successful post-dot-com-bust Net entrepreneurs who have not yet graduated.

  3. Net fraud on the rise

    The FBI reports having received more than 48,000 online-fraud complaints in 2002 - triple the number for the previous year, Wired News reports. Most of them were about online auction fraud, "followed by nondelivery of promised merchandise, credit-card fraud, and fake investments," the article points out. Dollar losses were $54 million last year, compared with $17 million in 2001. The piece refers and links to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, run by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond, Virginia.

  4. Posing as kids - for their own good

    They're cops who read Prom Magazine, know teens' favorite nail polish brands, and use the word "kewl" a lot in online chat. "They know, for example, that 'Britney is finished,' and that Avril Lavigne has become too popular to be used as a favorite music star [among teens chatting online]," the New York Times reports in the most in-depth article we've seen yet on what police officers across the US, and most probably in many other countries, are doing day-to-day to catch pedophiles targeting kids on the Net. "The job requires deep research into trivial subjects," according to the Times. On one detective's desk was "a copy of Men's Health magazine, open to an article about the significance of the location of women's tattoos." Another one had to know not to say who his favorite Beatle was because few 13-year-old girls would know Paul McCartney was a Beatle. The piece also gives examples of tactics pedophiles use to lure kids into meeting them in person (see the above COPPA feature up top with stats from kids about how much they're approached by strangers online).

  5. Libraries' (and parents') Net dilemma

    We hear a lot in the media about how libraries are dealing with the Net's arrival among the bookstacks. What we don't get much is parents' perspective on what children can encounter in Net-connected libraries. USAToday recently asked the question, "How safe is your child at the library?" Of course it depends on the individual library. Some have Internet filtering, some don't. But at least one librarian USAToday interviewed said filtering can give parents a false sense of security about leaving kids on their own at the library. He added that the world isn't the same as it was 30 years ago - whether we're talking about kids on playgrounds or at the public library. Our thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this story out.

  6. Child porn on P2P services

    porn publishers aren't the only distributors of adult content on file-sharing networks. Individual pedophiles are trading child pornography on these peer-to-peer services too, the BBC reports. The piece underscores recent coverage of studies by the US Congress and a private US company showing that porn is very much a presence on these services (see "File-sharing porn," 3/14, and "porn exceeds music in file-sharing," 3/21). In fact, the latter study found that porn-related traffic exceeds that of music on the Gnutella.com network.

    The BBC quotes UK police saying the file-sharing services are so useful to pedophiles because it's difficult to trace material on these huge networks. Kazaa.com, the most popular one, claims its software's been downloaded 201 million times, and there are more than 50 such services (see AfterNapster.com for a list and links). One of the newest, most high tech of these services, Piolet.com, says it's "totally decentralized," so it "will never be shut down." The company means there's no central database that anyone - police, litigants, or anyone else - could search, seize, or have shut down. All the material on these services, they say, resides on individual users' hard drives. That's what made file-sharing so revolutionary when Napster first came along in the mid-'90s, and why file-sharing keeps on growing long after Napster was shut down: The contents of all those hard drives (or the parts that participants allow to be shared) together constitute a huge global library of porn as well as perfectly innocent music, photo, and video files.

  7. Australia plans new child porn laws

    Australia's federal government announced that, under new laws it will introduce, downloading or distributing child pornography would become a federal offense, Australian IT reports. Justice and Customs Minister Chris Ellison said that people convicted for using the Internet for child porn will face up to 10-year prison sentences under this legislation, meaning that trading such images over the Net will get the same treatment as doing so in person, by mail, or any other means. "Senator Ellison said similar action would be taken to try to stop the Internet being used to promote suicide. He said there were more than 100,000 sites about suicide," the paper added.

  8. Why texting's not popular with US teens

    On their cell phones, Singaporeans send 247 text messages a day, on average; Filipinos send 198; the Irish more than 70; and Americans "just over 7." All this according to a very helpful piece at The Economist that actually explains why. "The short answer is that, in America, talk is cheap." The slightly longer explanation is that local calls on old-fashioned land lines are usually free in the US, where cell-phone companies, on the other hand, "have to offer big 'bundles' of minutes - up to 5,000 minutes per month - as part of their monthly pricing plans to persuade subscribers to use mobile phones instead," The Economist reports. Whereas, texting on mobile phones "took off in other parts of the world among cost-conscious teenagers who found that it was cheaper to text than to call." The free local calling in the US makes logging on to the Internet for hours on end and chatting with friends in instant-messaging teens' favorite form of digital communication. Of course, the mobile Internet will catch up in the US; for insights into this, don't miss a big-picture piece in the New York Times on the US's budding wireless revolution, where Steve Lohr writes, "To veterans of past cycles in technology, the wireless world today has the look of the personal computer business in the late 1970's or the Internet in the early 1990's."

  9. Texting parents about truancy

    Meanwhile in the UK, you know texting has arrived when schools start notifying parents "their little darlings are skipping school - by text." According to The Register, "a trial in the East Riding of Yorkshire will enable schools to broadcast texts from a PC to parents informing them of all the latest info from school. Text alerts could be about class closures or up-and-coming school events. But the 'edutxt' service could also be used for teachers to tell parents that their kids haven't shown up at school." There is also talk in Yorkshire of having students use text chat and SMS messages to learn together in the classroom, The Register reports.

  10. Unwiring at home

    Might Wired someday have to change its name? Untrue to its name, the magazine has published a helpful special report on how to get unwired, step by step. It covers everything from hardware to buy to securing, extending, and sharing your network. Even road warriors will find tips for mobilizing their wire-free family connectivity.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 


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