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Tag Archives: online privacy

Companies competing to protect our privacy?

12-Apr-13

It’d be an exaggeration to say that tech companies are falling over themselves to protect our privacy, but you might say that it’s becoming a “social norm” for US businesses. At least, that’s what the New York Times reports, and that must be at least a sign that it’s true because it’s far from normative [...]

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Why we do ‘let our guard down’: Online privacy

02-Apr-13

We care about our online privacy, but we also like convenience a whole lot. And not only convenience, but often a good deal or discount beats out any worry about data security. What do deals and convenience have to do with privacy? A whole lot. An article by Somini Sengupta at the New York Times [...]

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COPPA has likely increased minors’ risk: Study

29-Nov-12

If there were no Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, teens would be safer in social media, a new study from researchers at New York University indicates (pdf). Without COPPA, children under 13 would have little to no reason to lie about their age to set up a Facebook account, for example (this would be true [...]

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Teens flocking to Twitter for privacy?

06-Feb-12

Now that so many parents are on Facebook, teens are defying predictions and adding Twitter to their social toolboxes, according to an article at MSNBC. The number of teens using Twitter has doubled in the past two years, to 16% of 12-to-17-year-olds last July (the latest data available), the article cites the Pew Internet & [...]

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Kids lying to Facebook, not their parents: Study

01-Nov-11

A whole lot of us know that 13 is Facebook’s minimum age, but fewer of us know that the reason for that is not kids’ online safety but a law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act designed to protect the privacy of kids’ data – a law administered by the Federal Trade Commission, which [...]

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FTC’s proposed updates for COPPA

19-Sep-11

The US Federal Trade Commission has just announced its proposed changes for the 10-year-old Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the law that inadvertently created the social Web’s “minimum age” of 13 (in its effort to define an age when all children are developmentally able to protect their own privacy). Because COPPA requires children’s sites and [...]

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A new book & fresh look at online privacy

20-Jul-11

We may not be fully aware of it yet, but as our media environment is changing – from a top-down (regulated, professionally produced) one to a user-driven, multidirectional, social one – so is our idea of privacy. Slowly, maybe, but changing it is. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning, University of Southern [...]

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Various fresh findings on Facebook use

17-Jun-11

There used to be two bodies of research most relevant to kids online: social-media research and youth-online-risk research (as co-chair of an online-safety task force last year, I tried to bring more of the former into the discussion). But that binary is fading fast, as it should; since the Internet mirrors virtually all of human [...]

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Hawk drama (& human drama) in the digital age

16-May-11

The subhead might be: “Birth and growth under the digital microscope” or “The ‘observer effect’ with digital media.” And a red-tailed hawk family in New York City is the metaphor. In this case, mom and dad hawks built a nest outside the window of the 12th-floor office of New York University’s president, and “furnished it [...]

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Facebook privacy policy’s new look

03-Mar-11

Not another privacy-settings update, but not purely cosmetic – this is a better organized, more readable guide to privacy (and publicity) on Facebook.

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