News for the Week of May 6, 2007
Tops in kid-tech news this week is the growing number of states proposing laws requiring age verification online...
States' anti-predator efforts
Nearly three-quarters (72%) of US teens are "actively logging onto social networking Web sites," reports Yankee Group in a recent survey. Which means that "nearly every parent has nightmares that someone might visit those pages, easily discovering where the children live and what they like," the New York Times reports. So that in turn means politicians in many states are responding by proposing laws. Regulating the Internet — especially via state laws — is hard enough as it is, but calling for age verification in those laws is even trickier.
Tricky proposition
Proponents of such laws say things like, "if we can put a man on the moon, we can verify someone's age," the New York Times (see the link above). Opponents or skeptics view age verification as overkill, what I'd call a baby+bathwater result (one opposing state legislator told the Times such a law is more like a sledgehammer where a "small mallet" would work better). ID verification companies say it's not possible without a national database of children's personal information (civil liberties and consumer privacy organizations would have some things to say about that — not to mention many parents). Child-safety advocates say it could potentially provide a false sense of security for parents and greater risk — if kids simply go to another site parents don't know of that is less responsible to public opinion and parents' requests than MySpace or other popular sites laws would cover. What the Times article doesn't get into is all that's in the bathwater these proposed laws are trying to address but don't even begin to touch (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies" as well as "Verifying online kids' ages").
In other news...
- Web 2.0 is teen space. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently decided to get a better fix on this new phase of the Web, as it's so often called: who uses it and how they use it in the context of how they use the Internet and Net-connected devices in general. Pew's just-released findings — in "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users" - only further confirmed what a lot of us suspected. The user-driven Web is the youth-driven Web. Only 19% of adult Internet users in the US say they've shared something online that they've created themselves (artwork, photos, stories, videos), which is what Web 2.0 is all about. "The typology clearly shows how modern information technology is the province of youth," Pew found (p. 49). Here's CNET's coverage of the Pew study.
- Top-ranked social sites. It's no surprise that MySpace and Facebook were the first- and second-ranked social-networking sites on Compete.com's list for March '07 — in terms of both site visitors and "attention" (Compete's word for percentage of their online time people spend on a particular site). What was interesting was that Bebo was No. 9 in terms of visitors and No. 3 in terms of the amount of attention it gets from its users. "Bebo, a relatively new player in the space, has more than tripled in both unique visitors and attention from March 2006 to March 2007," the Compete blog reports. By attracting and engaging quality traffic, the site leaps from 9th ranked in Unique Visitors to third in Attention." Tagged, targeting mostly teens and with more than 30 million members, is No. 5 in both categories. Interestingly, BlackPlanet, targeting African Americans and with 16 million+ members, is No. 4 in Attention and not quite in the Top 10 in terms of unique visitors. Google's Orkut, which is huge in Brazil and ranks 8th in Attention, is only 22nd in terms of site visitors.
- PC patch-up time. Yesterday was "patch Tuesday," Microsoft's monthly security-patch day when all family-PC owners should be sure their computers have the latest security updates. This month, "at least 19 separate security holes in its Windows operating system and other software, including two vulnerabilities that criminals are actively exploiting to take control of Windows PCs," Washington Post computer-security writer Brian Krebs reports. Brian adds that Microsoft says all seven of the bundles these patches come in are "critical." Windows PC owners can find more info at Microsoft's security page.
- Prevention on the social Web. A tragic teen double-suicide case in Australia underscores the importance of loved ones and caregivers monitoring what at-risk youth say in their online profiles and blogs. Two 16-year-old girls in the Melbourne area apparently killed themselves in a suicide pact, posting "their own death notice — a farewell message to their online friends" in MySpace, The Star in Malaysia reports. The Star reporter seems to be making the assumption that "the idea of suicide emerged from the Internet," but I don't think the posting of a farewell message in a social site profile necessarily indicates this was where the girls' suicidal tendencies got started. Profiles and blogs are, however, the first places parents should check for what kids are really thinking if the latter are acting strangely at home. "The likelihood of a 'depressed, disaffected and disaffiliated' young person communicating with a soulmate online is a sure thing," The Star cites an Australian professor as saying. And there is certainly the possibility that at-risk people are getting the wrong kind of reinforcement online, such as sympathy or even promotion of destructive behavior from other people with mental health issues.
