News for the Week of January 13, 2008
The most important story in kid-tech news this week is the announcement of a new social-networking safety plan by MySpace and the attorneys general of 49 states...
MySpace plans new safety measures
Two years of negotiation between MySpace and the US's state attorneys general culminated in an announcement today that they'd reached an agreement on "Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety." Not all that I heard as I listened in on the press conference is new (MySpace has implemented dozens of safety measures and programs in the past year, including a 24-hour hotline for law enforcement). But a couple of new social-Web safety developments were announced, and the agreement may actually lead to consensus on industry best practices (e.g., high responsiveness to abuse reports, deletion of underage profiles and blogs, cooperation with law enforcement, etc.).
Here are the new developments I heard, some useful:
- Rapid response. MySpace said it was going to implement a new customer-service protocol for better responsiveness to abuse reports, and it was going to work harder to enforce the site's minimum age (14).
- A proposed email registry that would allow parents to send MySpace and other participating sites their children's email addresses, which would be blocked when the kids try to set up accounts with them. This has limited value, if I heard it right, since it's so easy for kids to get new, free email addresses at so many sites (e.g., Yahoo Mail, Hotmail) which they can use without telling their parents.
- A technical task force to explore age and identity verification. Among the participants will be Internet companies, law enforcement, and online-safety organizations, I heard. This is good - it puts the onus for exploring this concept on a broad spectrum of stakeholders, not just one social site.
2. Texas: lone holdout
Texas's was the only state attorney general not to sign the agreement. In a letter to MySpace founder Chris DeWolf, General Greg Abbott wrote that signing would be "misperceived as an endorsement of the inadequate safety measures contained therein," CNET reports. Nothing short of a "reliable age verification system" would protect children, he wrote.
Here's an interview about the announcement with MySpace/Fox Interactive chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam, conducted by CBS News technology analyst and ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid.
Within a couple of hours of the press conference, there were more than 500 news reports on this in Google News. Here's a sampler: The Associated Press, the Financial Times, and a CNET news blog.
In other news...
- Social networkers = spin doctors (hopefully). Let's hope a growing number of young social networkers understand that, on the social Web, personal communications is pretty much public relations. In "Net users are becoming their own reputation managers," a CNET commentator provides a good reminder. What our parents shared in private diaries, letters and phone conversations and we shared in all the above plus emails, our children are sharing in (hopefully not wholly public) social-networking profiles and blogs. "This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends," writes the commentator in an upbeat way. What I'm hoping is that young social Web users whose brains are still in development (see this at the National Institute of Mental Health) are aware of this "opportunity" and that they actually have less control over what they post than this commentary or social-networking sites would have them believe (once something's posted, for example, current "close friends" who may not always be so in future can copy and later paste it harmfully in a place well beyond the author's control).
- Oz to filter Web content nationwide. The Australian government is about to implement a nationwide Internet filtering program. New laws go into affect January 20 "imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones," the Herald Sun reports. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says adults won't be affected by the restrictions, which will require Internet service providers to access "free of pornography and other inappropriate material to houses and schools," content providers to check that young people of the correct age are accessing content designated for that age, and chatrooms to get "professionally assessed to determine whether [their] 'likely content' should be restricted," the Herald Sun and Agence France Presse report.
- Missouri cyberbullying: Case not closed. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are looking at charging the adult neighbor who created the imposter profile that led to a Missouri teen's suicide, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Prosecutors in Missouri said they were unable to find a statute under which to pursue a criminal case." The US Attorney's Office in L.A. believes it has jurisdiction because MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, and - creatively, the Times cites a legal experts as saying - the L.A. prosecutors are exploring charges involving federal wire fraud and cyber fraud because the woman "defrauded MySpace" by creating the imposter account, the Times cites anonymous sources as saying.
- 'Semi-permeable classrooms.' Educator and blogger David Jakes uses a term from his day as a biology teacher to describe how a classroom can safely be turned into a "learning community" that's neither closed nor completely open to the outside world. "I'm interested in building skills in students that will make them successful when they ultimately join wide-open learning communities. I'm teaching them how to read blog posts, how to collaboratively create content in wikis, how to comment appropriately, how to manage RSS feeds, and how to manage content resources with social bookmarking tools. I'm teaching them how to operate in a community. And I'm teaching them all about safety." I wish all my children's teachers approached technology this way!
