News for the Week of February 3, 2008
In youth-tech news this week, one of the nation's leading child safety experts explains what's good - and what can be improved - about last week's agreement between MySpace and the state attorneys general.
Key researcher's view
David Finkelhor, director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has been key to shaping our society's understanding of online child exploitation. The day after the agreement between MySpace and the state attorneys general was announced, a UNH publicist sent me comments from Finkelhor, who writes that it's an important agreement for a number of reasons. "A majority of online teens use social-networking sites, and the overwhelming number use MySpace, partly because of its openness," Finkelhor writes. "Unlike many other current child safety initiatives, such as sex offender residency restrictions, this one is nuanced and complex in its approach - for example, thinking about the different needs and risks for different aged youth."
Serious caveats
"The parties have not solved some of the most important problems, such as how to verify the ages of participants," Finkelhor writes. "The technology and social networking environment are changing so fast, much of this initiative could be obsolete in a year or two.
"The attorneys general should be congratulated for showing what can be done. But ultimately, this is not the best arrangement for 'watchdogging' the safety of kids online. We need more agencies with a national scope, both in the federal government, equivalent to the Federal Trade Commission, and in the private sector, equivalent to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, with the resources and leverage to be doing this study and negotiation on an ongoing basis."
In other news...
- Social sites safer than chat, IM: Study. Parents, don't just talk with your kids about social networking - chat sites and instant messaging really need to be in the conversation too. Despite the news media's focus on social-networking sites as the locus of online child exploitation, it turns out chat sites and instant-messaging are where most sexual solicitation and cyberbullying is happening. But even in those "places" online, "only 15% of children [aged 10-15] experience unwanted sexual solicitation and only a third report being harassed online," reports HealthDay News, citing a new study in Pediatrics. Here's the difference found between social sites and IM or chat: 4% of the nearly 1,600 children surveyed "reported experiencing an unwanted sexual solicitation and 9% reported being harassed while on a social networking site. Solicitations were reported 59% more often in instant messaging and 19% more often in chat rooms than social networking sites. More surprising, harassments were reported 96% more often in instant messaging than in social networking sites," say the study's authors - Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids and Kimberly Mitchell of the University of New Hampshire. Their advice for parents: "Internet safety is not just about whether your child is on MySpace or not. You should know what your children are doing on MySpace and Facebook. But you also need to know what your children are doing in school, after school, at parties, at the mall, online - basically all environments in which they engage."
- PC Magazine on parental controls. Parents might be interested in the latest reviews of filtering and monitoring software here at PC Magazine. The top-rated products are Net Nanny 5.6, Bsafe Online, Safe Eyes, and Webroot Child Safe. Note that these are "client" software products you install on the family computer. If you have the latest operating systems on Mac and Windows PCs, you can simply configure and use OS-level parental controls that are pretty feature-rich. But all these - OS or client - work only on the computers they run on. Kids' access on any other Net-connected computer or device (including those at friends' houses and, increasingly, cellphones) can be unfiltered, which means it's also good for kids and parents to work together on testing and using the filters between kids' ears: critical thinking and media literacy!
- 18-year-old registered sex offender. He was 17 when he downloaded child-abuse images. From the news reports, we don't really know why he did so. We do know that when he was interviewed by prosecutors, he "made full admissions," saying "he had no idea why he had done it," and "had no previous convictions, cautions, warnings or reprimands," the Hemel Gazette reports. We also know that "he had been spending a lot of time isolated and alone on his computer" because, his attorney said, "he had been bullied at school. At the beginning of 2006, when he was 16, he was beaten unconscious in the street by a gang, including bullies from the school." His sentence is a fine and two years of community service, and he will be on his local sex-offender registry for five years.
- High school classes in videogame design? That's what the Ohio Supercomputer Center is promoting, the Cleveland Morning Journal reports. "The process of creating a video game involves reading, comprehending, doing math and physics, plus problem solving to make the game's characters and other features function realistically," the Center says, adding that getting high school students involved in the process gets them hooked on math and science. "Video game design isn't just for entertainment; similar 'games' are used in medical training," editorializes the Morning Journal, citing an Associated Press report.
