by Sharon Duke Estroff
I have to admit I’m pretty darn cute. My avatar, ChillyLily437, that is. I’m plump, perky, and very pink. Only one more hurdle to jump before I can make my cybersocial debut on Club Penguin: an emailed permission slip from my parents.
Rather than submitting my real email address (this is a stealth operation after all!), I open up an alias email and have the CP powers-that-be send the consent form there. Within milliseconds my new inbox is flashing with a message informing me of “my child’s” Club Penguin registration, I’ve clicked the requisite activation link, and my undercover snowball is officially rolling.
Mom Break: Okay, I promised myself I wasn’t going to put my mom hat back on until at least Day 3. I mean, what’s the good of going undercover if you keep taking off your disguise? But PLEASE! Does Club Penguin really think that this parent email permission click deal is a viable safety measure? I created an alias email account in, what, two seconds? Our digital native offspring could easily do the same. I’m not saying that my child or your child would use a fake parent email to gain access to Club Penguin or a similar social network site. Or that one of their friends would use a fake parent email to grant Club Penguin access to every kid at school. I’m just saying….
So you may be thinking, “What’s the big deal? Club Penguin is not MySpace or Facebook, it’s a kid-oriented website for heaven’s sake.” But that’s precisely my point. The target market for social network sites like Club Penguin is ages 6 to 14 (more realistically 6-12, as few teens would be caught dead on such a “babyish” cyber-hangout). These are not teens, but elementary-aged children who need consistent parental presence, supervision, and direction in their lives. The ease with which kids can sidestep Club Penguin’s parental consent process – one of the Web site’s most basic safety measures – represents but the tip of a very precarious iceberg indeed.
Next week: “Snow Day”; here are my intro to Undercover Mom and Part 1 of Sharon’s series.
Good luck. Those safety measures can easily be ignored. There are worse things in other kinds of mmo’s
(Massively multiplayer online games.)
Such as lying about age, gender, etc and cyber bulling. There needs to be something to teach children how to be safe in these cyber worlds.
Actually, all the kids on there have been driven out by all the teenagers who go around attacking them and calling them names. They also go to the pet shops and act like babies, driving anyone who just wants a simple pet insane.
I also agree with the fact that kids now can make a fake E-mail almost immediately. But, most kids just enter a fake E-mail, and then they can’t play. There are some kids (like me) who are good with computers and would probably make their own alias E-mail.
Also, there are a large amount of member-only penguin hosted parties in igloos. I was going to host a non-member only party in my newly decorated igloo, only to find that I was a non-member!
I think Disney should at least come up with a way for funding (like everything else they do) to support CP. It’d stop all the bullying.