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Welcome to the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and thanks to everyone who's just subscribed! Please invite friends and colleagues to sign up, visit our blog, and help us to help grownups stay informed about children's safe, constructive use of the Internet. Email us anytime!

 

June 4, 2004

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for these first days of June:


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Online safety in US homes: A snapshot

A third of US parents are not concerned about their children's online safety, according to a nationwide survey for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The study, conducted by marketing services firm ADVO, Inc., found that 40% of parents (whose children under 18 use the Internet) are "very concerned," 28% "somewhat concerned," but - interestingly - the number of unconcerned parents is up significantly, from 20% to 33% over the past year. Parents have absorbed one cardinal online safety rule, apparently: More than 80% of households have the connected computer located in a shared space (rather than in child's bedroom or other place where parents are less aware of kids' online activities).

The survey also found that the most common precautions parents take with children using the Internet are: teaching them not to give out personal information without parents' permission (89%), monitoring their Internet use (88%), going online with the child(ren) (80%), forbidding online chat (69%), overseeing chat (56%), using filtering software (55%), and sharing an email account with the child (53%). Age distinctions weren't made with any of these stats.

Here are other as-yet-unpublished findings from the survey:


We'd love to hear about and publish online-safety rules and precautions at your house - they can be very helpful to fellow parents. Email them via feedback@netfamilynews.org (we publish reader comments only with permission).

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Web News Briefs

  1. 'Friends with benefits'

    It's unsettling but important reading, this week's look inside "the [US's] under-age sexual revolution, where causal sex is common, online ratings are scrutinized, everybody wants to be so detached, and boys still get what they want on Saturday night" in the New York Times Magazine. Here are some observations writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis makes just about the role the Internet plays in this "revolution":

    • Teens flirt online first, then decide whether to continue in "real life."
    • They spend a lot of time in sites like FaceTheJury.com (1.2 million members), HotorNot.com (4.3m members), and buddyPic.com, rating each other, updating their profiles, chatting, "asking the questions they might not dare to in real life," and deciding whether or not to "hook up" (for no-strings sex) with someone local they meet in the site.
    • Cell phones and the Net offer teenagers "an unparalleled level of privacy, making hooking up that much easier...."
    • A teenage boy says, "Who needs the hassle of dating when I've got online porn?"
    • The Internet has made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way "most of straight society assumes gay men act."

    This is a thoughtful piece, with plenty anecdotal material, some statistics, and historical context, finding some parallels between this generation and teenagers in the 1930s and '40s. It addresses gender questions, and factors in feminism, the abstinence movement, the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, perceptions about marriage, and other influences on teenagers' social lives.

    As for the rating Web sites teens reportedly flock to, here's another Times article focused just on them, the most innocuous of which is HotorNot.com. Some are more cruel than others, one psychiatrist told the times, adding that these sites feed on the narcissism increasingly pervading US culture.

  2. Beware Harry Potter worm!

    Tell any Harry Potter fans at your house not to open any Potter-related attachments in emails from people they don't know. A computer worm that was thought to have been long gone has made a comeback with Harry's help, ZDNet UK reports. UK software firm Sophos reported that "infections by the three-month-old 'P' variant of Netsky have risen dramatically over the past week, thanks to the worm's ability to disguise itself as a Harry Potter game or book." The latest Harry Potter film opened in Britain earlier this week and opens today in the US.

  3. Net blamed in Tokyo school killing

    In Japanese society's search for answers in the killing of a 12-year-old girl by a classmate, "Japanese media have turned to the Internet as a culprit," Reuters reports. It cites Japanese media coverage as saying the 11-year-old girl who confessed to the murder told police that she'd asked the victim not to post messages about her appearance on an online discussion board, but "her friend had refused to stop." Reuters also quotes Hosei University media studies Prof. Tatsuo Inamasu as saying that, though it can be a factor in escalating emotional reactions, the Internet can't be blamed for a murder. He suggested that parents and teachers tend to blame technology because they don't understand it, but a great factor is "the inability to communicate skillfully with another human being." He pointed to the extra care needed when communicating online, without the benefit of seeing the face and body language of the person receiving the message. Reuters adds that the Net is part of everyday life for Japanese children - over 60% of children 6- 12 use the Internet. As for this week's tragedy, the 11-year-old girl "will appear before a family court, which could send her to a special reformatory. Children under 14 cannot be prosecuted in Japan." [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this story out.]

  4. IM has grown up

    All you parents out there know that instant messaging isn't just text anymore, right? It's games, bots, videos, photo-swapping, tune-sharing, ringtones, individually customized "skins," etc. All of which makes it really attractive to kids and therefore yet another thing on which parents need to be up to speed. The BBC recently published an update on some of this, including a little history on this phenomenon that started in Israel in 1996 (with ICQ, bought by AOL in '98 for nearly $300 million) and has grown to pandemic proportions. With IM-forwarding to cell phones now, it will really take off in Europe and Asia, where text-messaging, or SMS, on mobile phones is way ahead of North America. The BBC's numbers are limited, but 2 billion messages a day on AOL's service and 19 million users of Yahoo Instant Messenger in the US alone give you a feel for IM's popularity. But parents also need to know that all these additional, kid-friendly features come with PC security risks - viruses, spyware, porn "spim" (IM spam), and strangers on buddy lists. Text, audio, still images, and video also use different ports, or access points into the family, so it's good for parents and kids to configure the IM software program's Preferences together - or at least talk about how aware everyone is of the risks (to kids and computers) that can be associated with instant-messaging. As a talking point and for some great perspective on all this, here's "Instant messaging risks and tips" from a tech-literate father of six.

  5. World's 299 million home Net users

    The number of active Internet users at home actually fell a bit - by 419,000 users - from March to April 2004, Nielsen NetRatings reports. " For the second consecutive month, Switzerland exhibited the largest growth rate at nearly 4%. Japan gained more active users than any of the other countries, while the US lost well over one million active surfers." The top 5 active Net user populations in Nielsen's chart of 13 are the US (144.4m), Japan (30.5m), Germany (27.2m), UK (20.7m), and Italy (15.6m).

  6. The tool of anonymity

    If this weren't a story told by a wire service picked up by news outlets in other countries, it would be hard to believe. But it's the true story of a 14-year-old boy, "Boy B," attempting suicide by inventing a case for his own murder in online chat. The self-created victim used the anonymity of the Internet to create and pose as various participants in an elaborate story that persuaded a 16-year-old boy to attempt his murder. "The older teenager was eventually persuaded that he had been recruited by the British Secret Service to kill Boy B, after which he would be rewarded with a job as well as a sexual relationship with [a] 39-year-old female 'spy'. In June last year, Boy A carried out his 'orders' and stabbed his online friend - who, he had also been told, was suffering from a cancerous tumor," he told the court, according to Agence France-Press. The would-be victim did not die, and police investigating the case pieced the story together from "56,000 lines of computer chatroom text between Boy A and his various real and invented correspondents." The police told AFP they didn't know why Boy A wanted to die.

  7. Credit card firm drops online porn biz

    Porn doesn't pay, apparently, at least for one e-commerce company. Citing business reasons, Colorado-based Cardservice International announced it was dropping all of its online adult industry clients, Web Host News reports. The company processes "more than $12 billion in annual credit card volume with more than 125 million transactions annually in 140 languages."

  8. Better shooter game?

    For parents concerned about the impact of first-person-shooter games, this new one's at the intersection of that concern and what teen gamers tell me - that strategy (not violence) is what holds their interest. I had fun reading the New York Times's review about how Far Cry's main character, Jack Carver, is probably thinking he needs a new travel agent, because as he "roams a beautiful island of white sandy beaches, clear turquoise water and palm trees full of colorful birds, he still has to deal with such vacation annoyances as insects, sunburn, paramilitary troops and lethal, genetically altered monkeys." Game Theory columnist Charles Herold says "the game's originality goes far beyond colorful dragonflies lazing through the tall grasses," explaining that Far Cry is different from most games that "funnel the player down a particular path, placing combatants where they are sure to be encountered." Far Cry players have many options; they have to use their heads to make their way through the experience safely so they can live to provide feedback to their travel agents.

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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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