• Child info floating around the Net. The Los Angeles Times article features a very anxious mom whose story illustrates a data security issue much broader than lost or stolen laptops with databases of people's personal info on their hard drives. It's about what's happening as "vast databases of sensitive information are bought and sold by private companies" focused a lot more on monetizing millions of registered users than on protecting the users' privacy. "Reunion.com's privacy policy says the site 'prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13'," the Times reports. "But that doesn't address the site's own data-gathering." The company told the Times it had bought the records of 260 million people from a data broker that it said was told not to include minors in the purchased data. Still, the name of the mom's 4-year-old child showed up on a page she stumbled on in Reunion.com. "She was especially distressed that the listing for her husband's name included the family's town, Beaverton - not the sort of information she wanted anywhere near her son's identity." And now it's in the L.A. Times too.
• Wii game & its rating criticized. Zooming in on Beer Pong for the Nintendo Wii, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is calling for a change in the way videogames are rated, the Hartford Courant reports. He pointed to the Entertainment Software Rating Board's "Teen" (13+) rating for the game. I couldn't find "Beer Pong" in ESRB.org's search engine, but it may have been removed because its maker, JV Games, says the game's name is being changed to Pong Toss, the Associated Press reports (I couldn't find Pong Toss either). JV Games says "the video game was never about alcohol, but rather the growing sport that has developed around [the popular college drinking game] beer pong." According to the ESRB, "alcohol played a minimal role in the game and no one was shown drinking beer." No one, including the ESRB, could argue that the US's game rating system is perfect, but it does give parents something to go by - a sense of definition - when the pressure's on to buy a game. Certainly there's value, too, in bringing attention to anything that promotes or even gives kids any comfort level with excessive or binge drinking.
• South Africa's child abuse hotline. South Africa has joined the ranks of countries that have child pornography hotlines. The hotline is available via the Web. "The website, www.fpbprochild.org.za, which is available 24 hours, seven days a week, was launched in Johannesburg on Tuesday by Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba," South African news service Bua News reports. At least 29 countries have hotlines now. INHOPE, an international association of child abuse hotlines, lists them here.
• 'Wii-hab' for patients. That's St. Mary's Medical Center's Wii-hab Program. The San Francisco hospital uses the Nintendo Wii for patients' physical rehabilitation, this CNET video reports. About 100 people have been helped in the program, which combines the Wii with other therapies. It's the brainchild of Dr. David Liu, "self-described techie" and chair of the back and trauma rehab dept., who says the games' "fun factor" helps patients in the back and trauma rehab department he chairs to forget about pain and weak spots and keep moving. Gives new meaning to the term "leveling" (usually applied to that urge to go up higher in multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft)!

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