NetFamilyNews

Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users

2008-07-18T12:31:00.006-06:00

It stands to reason that bullying happens in kids' virtual worlds (e.g., Club Penguin, Webkinz, Neopets, Nicktropolis, etc.), because, well, it happens in school, instant messaging, and social-networking sites. But I hadn't learned how it happened until Sharon Duke Estroff called me about it. The Atlanta-based parenting columnist, former elementary school teacher, kids' pop culture expert, author, and mother of four spent a couple of weeks in Club Penguin to learn what her eight-year-old son might experience there. She didn't like everything she saw.

Having occasionally watched my own son waddle around and play games in Club Penguin and thought it was pretty cute, I asked her why. Sharon - who will tell you that she's definitely not an overreactor where parenting's concerned - proceeded to tell me what she learned about digital pre-adolescent behavior in CP (and I have no doubt similar experiences are to be had in every other virtual playground on the Web).

Not that her CP time was all bad, of course, but there were some "Lord of the Flies moments" just like in real-life elementary school, and I thought you'd like to know what the virtual versions look like - techniques kids have developed for beating the system so they can move all that social behavior at school, good and bad, online. Simply put, they're "workarounds"- some but not all about meanness or bullying. So I boiled the behavioral parts of what Sharon told me down to a list of eight (note how sophisticated these workarounds' young creators are):

1. Beating the language filter. Putting consecutive words in separate message "bubbles," spaces between letters, creative capitalization and punctuation, etc. - whatever it takes to say what they like, including mean stuff and invitations to "visit me alone in my igloo."

2. Code lingo. Not just POS ("parent over shoulder") or ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing"), but text-formatting tricks that get around safe-language rules: e.g., if language filters don't allow numbers, kids share their ages by expressing them in dots. For example, they ask, "How many dots are you?" and get back: "I'm ........."

3. ID theft, kid-style. One of the cardinal rules of online safety is never to share your password because best friends sometimes become non-friends and can impersonate and embarrass you. Password-sharing, however, is rampant in kid virtual worlds - a popular way of offering and accepting best-friend status. It becomes a problem when your "best friend" logs on as your avatar and makes it break the rules so you get kicked out.

4. Stealing virtual possessions. Kids also use peers' passwords to steal their virtual clothes, furniture, and other in-world possessions so the victims have to start over or walk around as naked avatars and so the thief, succumbing to some sort of pre-adolescent digital version of "keeping up with the Joneses," can add to his/her in-world prestige (as well as the real-world kind - because, Sharon said, a lot of penguins know each other as humans at school too).

5. Abusing abuse reporting. The digital version of tattling: being mean by reporting avatars just so they get privileges taken away. "Kids can report other kids for all kinds of vague reasons, but they don't have to give a reason - all they have to do is press a button on the player card and the complaint goes straight to the monitor," Sharon said.

6. Using safety features to bully. Using blocking, ghosting, ignoring, and other in-world user-security tools to a ostracize kid or make it clear he's not a member of "the club" - whatever the club-of-the-moment is.

7. Digital "Spin the Bottle." Those pre-teen games for exploring dating and sexuality have moved into cyberspace. Kids manipulate their avatars and a virtual world's systems to create opportunities to explore virtual sexuality too. An example in Club Penguin: "Spin the Fish," only the fish doesn't spin; "you have to pretend it does," according to young CP lifestyles blogger Imatweetybrd, whose blog Sharon found. "You either say 'I'll spin!' or someone will tell you to spin. Then, most likely, you are just going to say 'spin,' then 'it landed on [the penguin's name that you like most]. At that point, you go up the person and say 'mwah.' Then your turn's over. Your penguin might like you back and ask you out or maybe you want to ask him out, then you guys can leave the game or whatever."

8. Kid avatars have cheats too. Just because the person behind the avatar is only nine years old certainly does not mean s/he's any less savvy about how to find cheats to beat the game and make coins or points a lot faster in order to have a bigger place of residence and more clothes, puffles, and furniture. The kid just types the name of an in-world game into a Web search engine and turns up hundreds of tips, or "cheats," as they're called - situation normal in the world of videogames (clearly also for people of younger and younger age, we now see).

My takeaways

First it should be acknowledged that there are plenty of positive and just plain fun things about Club Penguin too (check out its kid philanthropy feature). It's possible the average child user (probably 7-10 - not teen hackers like Mike 92 in Related links below) could experience or use one or two of the above workarounds, but not likely all, unless he or she is looking for trouble, feeling mean, or really into power in a social sort of way. Putting all the workarounds together here is designed only to help parents ask intelligent questions.

My 11-year-old was an avid CP user for a few weeks last year, but he never noticed any of the above except a few cheats (penguins a little too good at some games) and occasional meanness - trigger-happy abuse reporters or safety-feature abusers - and none of it ruined his fun in CP, but CP also wasn't the all of his entertainment or social life (balanced lives do help us not take certain things too seriously). The workarounds only confirm for me that, wherever kids are online, alertness and critical thinking are needed on the part of children as well as parents. Club Penguin and other kid virtual worlds are not babysitters! But they are great social-networking training for both participants and parents. They offer many teachable moments for learning all kinds of things: e.g., how to treat others online as well as offline, how to be a good citizen and friend, how to detect social and commercial manipulation, how to deal with peer pressure and group think, and even how to be a leader.

Readers, we'd love to hear about your children's virtual-world experiences in the ConnectSafely.org forum. Email's ok too, via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Visual aids: "Club Penguin Robbery" video at YouTube in which director/producer/penguin Mike 92 robs Club Penguin's bank and gets his just desserts (here's his cheats site). I'm guessing Mike is a teenager who uses CP as a hacking and video-producing creative outlet (hacking isn't necessarily illegal or malicious). Another, more bird's-eye view of cheating the systems is "How to move peoples stuff on Club Penguin."

For some nearly original digital kid anthropology research, surf around the Club Penguin Coolers blog.

Sharon Duke Estroff's bio Web site

Good for dinnertable discussion: "How social influencing works"

ConnectSafely.org's Safety Tips & Advice page

Griefers: Gamer worlds' bullies

2008-07-17T14:20:00.003-06:00

Griefers aren't new to gaming communities, but they're apparently becoming a fixture in multiplayer online games too - games such as World of Warcraft, RuneScape and Everquest, Reuters reports. "Unlike traditional Internet bullies who work through instant messages and cell phones, griefers lurk on online multi-player videogames, harassing their victim by bullying, tormenting or thwarting other players in the game," according to Reuters. For help on how to deal with this, see "10 Tips for Dealing with Griefers" at Microsoft.com, "Dealing with Griefers in Second Life" at MindSigh.com, and in a World of Warcraft forum, "Nazsh's Guide to Dealing with Griefers." See also "Support for young videogamers."

Xbox Live with avatars

2008-07-17T12:49:00.002-06:00

It really seems as if all gaming community is going the way of online virtual worlds now. The new Xbox Live, just announced by Microsoft this week, will be more like virtual life than ever. The gaming community for the Xbox console will soon be more three-dimensional - a suitable "space" for the avatars, or animated characters, gamers will create for it," the Financial Times reports. "The avatars demonstrated by Microsoft appeared more sophisticated than the popular Wii Miis of Nintendo's console but less ambitious than the characters possible in the much delayed Home virtual world planned for Sony's PlayStation3." The FT added that Xbox Live's new look and feel will simply happen with a free software update that'll be available in the fall. For more Xbox news, see the San Jose Mercury News.

Videogames: Less predictable, more fun

2008-07-17T12:42:00.001-06:00

Ah, the growing challenge of being a videogamer. Not only are there more and more real people behind game characters (in multiplayer online games), but the game characters in console games are getting smarter. "Recent advancements in video game design - and new game consoles with dazzling computing power - have endowed computer-controlled characters with a sense of self-preservation and unpredictability not seen even a year ago," the Associated Press reports. The AP gives the example of the soon-to-be-released Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, in which stormtroopers don't just sit there when you throw something at them. "They may toss a grenade back. Or they might just put their hands up." Increasingly, reactions are not predictable. The latest Grand Theft Auto game was the first to use this technology that creates animation "on the fly," as the gamer plays - probably part of the explanation for GTA4's April sales having surpassed those of a blockbuster movie opening (and may have an impact on holiday wish lists, since only the latest consoles can support this new technology). The moment-by-moment decisions of other people are what create the unpredictability of multiplayer online games.

'Soon we'll all be gamers'

2008-07-16T10:30:00.002-06:00

It's not an exaggeration. I'll start with sales figures, but they're not the only indicator: In the first five months of this year retail sales of videogame software alone (not consoles) "grew 45% over the same period last year to $3.42 billion." Overall videogame industry growth was 32%," the San Jose Mercury News reports. In the UK, sales were up 28% the first half of this year to 33 million+ pounds (about $66 million), the Times of London reports. Other interesting indicators from the Times that this is not merely a phase. "Nintendo is now Japan's second most valuable company - trailing the car maker Toyota but ahead of giants such as Canon and Panasonic." High valuation of game makers in general is "an expression of the market's belief that this industry still has an enormous amount of room to grow," according to the Times, pointing to the explosive growth "that comes when everyone is converted to playing videogames" (with the first generation of child gamers becoming parents themselves and "whole families now gathering around a game console"). Female gamers are certainly in there, representing 38-40% of all gamers, CNET reports, citing two organizations' figures, and "the average female gamer plays games 7.4 hours per week," according to the Entertainment Software Association's figures. Meanwhile, the premier gaming industry conference "E3" is in process in L.A. this week (see the New York Times's scenesetter), thus all the videogame news.

Supreme Court justice's P2P security breach

2008-07-16T09:59:00.002-06:00

No, Justice Breyer wasn't using a file-sharing network himself. But a guy at his investment firm was on LimeWire and inadvertently shared "the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm's clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer," the Washington Post reports. This isn't just about file-sharing in the workplace. It's about how private family records and information can be made public on P2P networks if file-sharers and music fans at home aren't configuring the software correctly. It's only one key topic for family discussion about file-sharing, others being the ethics of file-sharing and the potential for parents being sued by the RIAA for pirated music shared on family computers (at least go into the software with your kid and see how Preferences, Options, or Sharing is set up).

Googles deals with sex chat on Lively

2008-07-16T07:55:00.003-06:00

Last week I wrote about Google's launch of Lively avatar chat, ending with a caveat that seems to apply to so much of the social Web: that there were sex-related chat rooms in the Popular Rooms list. This week CNET reports the same: "Despite some injunctions to the contrary, sexual overtones are creeping into" Lively, with the qualification that "a little snooping around revealed some evidence of borderline rooms, but nothing as risque as shows in the more permissive realm of Second Life" (which does have ratings so those who want to can avoid sex-related virtual locations). Google told CNET it's taking complaints about these seriously and is "working to remove them." I think this is an example of one of the points Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain makes in his book The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It - that users' abuses of user-driven services make them less attractive to mainstream users and could have the effect of stigmatizing them or sending the mainstream increasingly to "safer," more controlled services ultimately to the detriment of what's good and constructive on the participatory Web (that may not be his main point, but it was one of my takeaways from a talk he gave).

The costs of communicative families

2008-07-14T14:14:00.003-06:00

For a reality check on the cost of being highly communicative families, check out a column by Larry Magid, my co-director at ConnectSafely.org, in the San Jose Mercury News. It's so great that Apple lowered the cost of an iPhone by $200 (to $199), but then AT&T "raised the price of the data plan for the new iPhone by $10 a month, which more than wipes out the savings" from the hardware, Larry points out. And that's the point exactly: Look at the cost of service for all our household communication devices and technologies all told, and try not to choke. Just talking on the phone costs the highly communicative Magid family "$3,720 a year," not including "extras like international calls or when we go over our allotted cell phone minutes." Then there's Internet service, PC security services, cable TV, TiVo or Netflix, Xbox Live, etc., etc. Larry and I were just talking about what this must look like in other parts of the world - wondering if anybody has calculated how many families in third-world countries could be fed for the amount of money racked up by Net-literate, highly connected US families.

A case for critical thinking

2008-07-14T11:21:00.002-06:00

This didn't come up when we were in school! Which is why it's important for us parents to know about it: Photoshopped news photos for propaganda and many other purposes. Nikki Leon at the Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Natives site recently blogged about a photo of missiles in Iran having been altered apparently for political purposes. "The picture, a view of three test missiles launching, was altered to include four (hiding one that failed)," she writes. After mentioning that the photo was used by prominent news outlets (e.g., the BBC, L.A. Times, etc.), she asked the good question of what this means for young Net users. She concludes that "incidents like this week’s explosive photoshoppery are a reminder that students need to be taught how to evaluate online material just as they are encouraged to assess historical print sources [because] ... it is likely that propaganda of this variety will be produced with greater skill and distributed with greater frequency. It is up to teachers, parents, and Digital Natives themselves to ensure that young people will be critical enough to demand the truth." In fact, a friend and teacher in Los Angeles recently told me, "our job is no longer to put information into kids' heads, since they already know more than we do. Our job is more to them filter and manage it all."

2 virtual worlds: NECC and Second Life!

2008-07-11T16:15:00.004-06:00

Last week I went to my first NECC, the giant National Educational Computing Conference, this year in sticky, toasty San Antonio. We heard at the keynote (appropriately given by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds) that some 18,000, mostly tech educators, were there. I was there to speak on a panel about online safety presented by the California Technology Assistance Project, which had Larry Magid and me speak about our book, MySpace Unraveled, a couple of years ago (more about CTAP in a moment) and to steep myself in tech education for a few days.

NECC was both inspiring and overwhelming. But overwhelming was good because, instead of trying to figure out what on earth to sample of the hundreds of workshops and presentations, I decided to go deep. I went to everything I could find about virtual worlds Second Life and Teen Second Life (besides my online-safety meetings). I'd long wanted to learn more about SL and virtual worlds in general, and what better way?

Which takes me to the inspiring part: what tech educators are doing in Teen Second Life (parents, you've got to see this stuff!). I attended presentations by two rockstars of the ed tech world....

Peggy Sheehy of Suffern Middle School in the New York area and creator of Ramapo Islands, I believe the very first real-life school in Teen SL (here's a video intro to what's happening at Ramapo, including the students' views, in the blog of another genius tech educator and Second Life resident, Kevin Jarrett), and if you prefer text to video, here's a transcript in Sheehy's blog of a mock trial based on Of Mice and Men staged by Suffern students (or rather their avatars) in Teen Second Life. Ramapo is now six islands in Teen SL, used by 1,000 students and 35 teachers.

Westley Field from Sydney, Australia, founder of the very international Skoolaborate.com and Skoolaborate Island in Teen SL (to see what's going on there, check out the first video on this page). So far this new project has 10 schools in 4 countries collaborating.

Just a few positives I witnessed and heard about in my NECC brushes with education in Second Life (watch this space for more on all this): a girl who never participated in class blossoming in virtual-world classes and then later in real life; the same for a boy whose mother wrote a profound thank you note to his teacher; students in multiple countries learning what species are endangered in others and together creating virtual spaces for them with the kind of environments in which they can thrive; students thinking critically together about body image and developing more healthy views of said by creating different avatars representing their evolving views; an entire class reading all of Of Mice and Men, not just the Cliff Notes, so they could play judges, DAs, prosecutors, witnesses, court reporters, jury members, etc. in the mock trial; students who don't want to miss any of it logging in from home when they're sick.

The amazing CTAP

I'm referring specifically to Region IV of a statewide project to help California's educators integrate technology into learning but also deal with students' extracurricular use of tech! I definitely have a bias because, through my friend, ed-tech eyes 'n' ears, and CTAP staffer Anne Bubnic, I have learned a great deal about both technology and education! You'll see at a glance on this CTAP4 page how much they're doing for California educators just in the area of cyber safety, which CTAP intelligently defines as "the safe and responsible use of the Internet and all information and communication technology devices, including mobile phones, digital cameras, and webcams."

This one region of a state project has a huge sphere of influence. Its funding is for assisting California schools, but the Web has a way of ignoring borders and the Web-wide, worldwide resources Anne has pulled together in Region 4's site are valuable to educators at least nationwide. In addition to the site it continuously updates, CTAP also trains teachers, administrators, school safety people, etc. in person and via videoconferencing. Obviously this second part of its work isn't as visible to all, so I'm going to zoom in on that training in a feature very soon.

Why all this about tech education in NetFamilyNews? Parents' certainly aren't the only shoulders on which society places responsibility for young people's constructive use of technology! Most of the negative stuff involving youth on the social Web is not criminal, so law enforcement (where people so often turn) usually can't help. Very often, then, the focus shifts to school policy and discipline. Yet, a lot of the imposter profiles, defaming blog posts, and general online or phone harassment that disrupts learning at school originates at home or somewhere else off school grounds. So it can really help parents to know what teachers and administrators are dealing with where student behavior's concerned, so the two parties can collaborate - with each other as well as the student(s) involved, hopefully - in solving tech-related problems that come up (see also "Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together"). Problems involving the participatory Web require participatory solutions!

Related links

Peggy Sheehy's Suffern Middle School in Second Life

Westley Field's Skoolaborate

Kevin Jarrett's The Story of My Second Life

The official California Technology Assistance Project Web site's page about all the CTAP regions and their projects and Region 4's specifically (I'd like to know what other states have along the lines of CTAP - email me, people! - via anne@netfamilynews.org).

Google's new avatar chat

2008-07-10T22:53:00.000-06:00

Google's Lively.com, introduced this week, is kind of Second Life Lite. Both provide software you download to create your own avatar (a cartoon-like digital representation of yourself). But instead of creating and living in a piece of a very large virtual world, as in Second Life, with Lively you simply create a chatroom (or choose and customize one someone else has created and made available to all users) that can fit up to 20 of your friends' avatars at a time. The product will probably have a lot of appeal for kids and teens for a number of reasons: it's creative and self-expressive, allowing young people to experiment with identity (a key task of adolescence, child development experts say); it's about communication and socializing; there's no learning curve; it's basically an add-on to teens' existing social utilities, blogs and social sites; and they can embed their chatrooms in their blogs, social-networking profiles, or any other Web page, "as easily as a YouTube video," the New York Times reports (right now the software's only available for Windows XP and Vista computers). Here's brief coverage of the Lively launch from the Financial Times.

Parents will probably want to be aware that there is as much potential downside for young users of Lively as for any other user-driven service of the social Web. As of this writing, right on the second page of the Popular Rooms list are several sex-related rooms to choose from and download. Lively's minimum age is 13 and the service's Community Standards say people under 18 "must have their parent or legal guardian's permission to use Lively. If we become aware that a user is under 13, we will delete their account." However, as far as I could see, neither the Community Standards page nor the Help Center says how to submit that permission.

Crucial questions about Web 2.0, society

2008-07-10T17:29:00.002-06:00

This story's importance grows as the Web increasingly mirrors "real life." Society seems to be in an interesting transition time, and some important freedoms could be lost as it struggles to understand the user-driven Web. For example, in an effort to reduce risk or prevent harm, people (including parents) sometimes blame Web sites (e.g., social-networking sites) more than the relationships represented in them, for online harassment; so those sites, perhaps to stave off lawsuits, play "a governmental role" and sweepingly "wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal," to quote the Associated Press. Users whose legitimate or legal content that gets deleted try to appeal those corporate decisions, but companies' legal advisers are usually the decisionmakers and "no" often the answer. That "governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world," the AP continues. The questions are: whether decisions by corporate legal departments reacting to public fears and ignorance will jeopardize some freedoms we cherish, how to ease those fears and misunderstandings, and where the burden of easing them should rest.

The video-driven Internet

2008-07-09T09:56:00.000-06:00

It's really the user-driven Net, but all those users out there are viewing, producing, and uploading more and more video. The lead of this article says a lot: "Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet." CNET reports that Internet service providers are scrambling to figure out how to keep up with all the "video-driven bandwidth demand." Demand grows as household use of broadband grows. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported that 55% of US households now have broadband connections, up from 47% a year ago. CNET cites ComScore figures showing that "Americans are currently watching upward of 10 billion videos online a month" and reports that that's only the beginning. The rest of the piece is about what service providers are working on as they figure out how to support our habit.

'Wii-hab' for patients

2008-07-08T12:31:00.002-06:00

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 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)! [See also "Videogame fitness training."]

Wii game & its rating criticized

2008-07-08T12:19:00.001-06:00

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. See also WhatTheyPlay.com's 3 tips for videogamers' parents.

Good citizens in virtual worlds, too

2008-07-07T20:02:00.004-06:00

I truly believe that children's good citizenship online helps protect them - and it's a large and growing piece of the online-safety puzzle. How so? Because (I know I've quoted this here before) "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization," according to an analysis from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. So I was delighted to find "Raising Good Citizens for a Virtual World," a five-lesson course from author and tech educator Doug Johnson (thanks for bookmarking it, Anne Bubnic). But this is not rocket science, parents. Don't be put off by the words "course" or "five lessons." If you can just help your kids apply what they're learning about how to treat people respectfully and function in community to the online part of their lives, you're accomplishing a lot. Doug points out that the degree of anonymity cyberspace has an all-bets-off effect that people take advantage of. It's true. But this doesn't complicate things; it's simply why the same ethics and citizenship we've always taught them need to be applied to online behavior too. The other protective tool that needs to be applied online is critical thinking (see "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works").

Predation in online gaming

2008-07-04T15:20:00.003-06:00

Police have been saying that predators go where kids go, and they've been saying it since before there was an Internet. So the "place" that the news media and online-safety advocates are increasingly focusing on is online gaming. I first linked you to a story about this in January 2006 (see "Teen exploited while gaming"); in May, a report out of Cincinnati saying the FBI was investigating "a number of cases in southern Ohio" concerning Xbox Live; and last month we heard from a US attorney in Massachusetts that cases of man-to-minor predation involving World of Warcraft were under investigation. This week USATODAY reported on online-game predation cases in Utah and Michigan. Where the Xbox Live gaming community is concerned, "Microsoft trains police at national conferences," according to USATODAY. Parents need to know that "Xbox has password-protected 'family settings' that allow parents to turn off Internet access or track content and contacts. PlayStation and Wii also have such controls." I was delighted to learn last summer that there is some "neighborhood watch," or community policing, activity in Xbox Live (see this feature) and hope to see more evidence of this other form of protection that can be empowering for kids. For some context around all this, see this editorial too. The No. 1 message for parents in all this is the importance of teaching our kids to be alert and responsible wherever and whenever they're in places where lots of people interact, online or offline. Alert about what? See "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works."

South Africa's child abuse hotline

2008-07-04T15:11:00.002-06:00

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.

Child info floating around the Net

2008-07-03T09:30:00.001-06:00

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.

Young sex offenders branded forever

2008-07-02T09:32:00.000-06:00

One of the scary things about the social Web is how much exposure its users bring to their everyday lives and innermost thoughts. But think about the impact of mixing exposure - to public view or just to law enforcement - with impulsive, unthinking adolescent behavior that involves sexual exploration with peers. For example, in the state of Washington alone, "since 1997, more than 3,500 children in the state - some as young as 10, though on average about 14 - have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders, a mark that remains on their records forever, barring them from careers in medicine, teaching or a host of other professions that serve the vulnerable," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. A 13-year-old (now 23) whose story led the article was arrested at home by himself and handcuffed to a plastic chair while his mother was called and told her "pervert son was going to jail." The vast majority of these young felons are rated least likely to reoffend, the article continues. Even so, the Post-Intelligencer reports, "Washington is among the few states to include juveniles in its sex offender management plan, assessing youths with tools designed for adults and funneling them through the courts with adult-sized punishments."

Data insecurity on the rise

2008-07-01T10:12:00.002-06:00

Here's one reason why verification of online children's ages or identities is a slightly scary concept: data breaches are up. What does this have to do with online kids? If age verification is required of Web sites, children's personal information would have to be stored in a database somewhere, so that Web sites' "bouncers," or ID-checking technology, will have a collection of information against which it can check the info kids provide. The problem is, "businesses, governments and universities reported a record number of data breaches in the first half of this year, a 69% increase over the same period in 2007," Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs reports, citing research from the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center. Interestingly, hacking was "the least-cited cause of data breaches in the first six months of 2008.... Instead, lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media remain the most frequently cited cause of data breaches. See also "UK data security breach & kids." And I seem to be seeing more news of data breaches all the time, the latest for Google employees - see CNET.

Transatlantic predator panic

2008-06-30T09:13:00.001-06:00

It kind of surprised me seeing this coming out of Britain, that "the specter of the predatory pedophile is everywhere." I thought it was everywhere only here in the US, where we've had a predator panic going for some time and it has subsided somewhat (see "Predator panic," which I wrote back in May 2006). It doesn't surprise me, however, that this good question is coming out of the UK (in the same BBC blog post): "Have we got our response to child sex abuse in proportion? Or ... are we in danger of destroying the very thing we aim to protect - a trusting relationship between adults and children?" I wish blogger Mark Easton had answered or at least expanded on that theme. Instead, he makes a different but related valid point about the sheer numbers of child abusers ("The NSPCC [National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children] estimates that at any one time, 1 million children are suffering sexual abuse") and how most are people the children know (and still more are never found out). But I do think that question about society's response deserves serious consideration on both sides of the Atlantic. Heightened fears lead to strong reactions, often overreaction, which reduces trust and communication between parents and children. When parents act out of fear and get categorical, teens tend to seek even more distance from them than normal adolescent development would call for and go "underground," where - not necessarily but possibly - they could be at greater risk. I think working through the risks and adult fears together, openly and calmly, is a more effective approach at both the household and societal levels.

Benefits of social networking: Study

2008-06-27T08:45:00.001-06:00

In what Science Daily calls a "first-of-its-kind study" of teen social-networking practices, researchers at the University of Minnesota looked low-income, 16-to-18-year-olds in 13 urban schools in the Midwest. It found that - contrary to reports of a high-income/low-income digital divide - 94% use the Internet, 82% go online at home, and 77% had social-network profiles. "When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills." They're editing and creating content, designing and laying out pages, creating "original work like poetry and film," and "practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology," the researchers said, adding that social network sites "offer tremendous educational potential." Though directed at educators, I thought this point from study author Christine Greenhow just as useful to parents: She "suggests that educators can help students realize even more benefits from their social network site use by working to deepen students' still emerging ideas about what it means to be a good digital citizen and leader online," Science Daily reports. Here's a video interview with Dr. Greenhow.

Social-networking manners

2008-06-26T07:18:00.001-06:00

A Telegraph columnist understandably asks, basically: What's wrong with this picture - a stuffy old publisher "identified in the popular mind with ... the appropriate usage of pudding forks and cheese knives" writing rules for polite social networking? But somebody at Debrett's must have a profile in MySpace, Bebo, or Facebook. They're pretty good rules, actually - except maybe for the one that says you're supposed to always use a phone or card to wish a friend happy birthday, not a comment on his/her wall. However, Washington Post writer Kim Hart, blogged this question: "When it comes to maintaining relationships, do social networks let us 'cheat' a little too much?" She was writing about a just-released survey by the Consumer Internet Barometer finding that "common pet peeves among social-networking regulars include 'lack of manners'." Debrett's five "golden rules" are at the bottom of this other Telegraph report on the subject. It'd be very interesting to ask a teenage focus group what's missing. And the Telegraph columnist's right, of course, that "codes of behaviour emerge from the users [of social sites], and are constantly modified by them." It's just that some older users don't always want to wait that long.

What makes good digital citizens?

2008-06-25T09:46:00.002-06:00

The answer at Digizen.org points to the next phase, I think, of all our efforts in online safety: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same." That helps me think about how to teach children accountability for their behavior online. If they begin to see online environments as communities they're helping to shape so that they have a stake in appearance, atmosphere, and outcomes of activity within them, they'll simply act more accountably. Maybe disinhibition and anonymity become less problematic when users are citizens as much as socializers. Digizen.org, a report from UK-based Childnet International, looks at social networking with this potential in mind. The report examines the risks but also how the social Web is "being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges." The site defines social networking and links to a pdf comparison chart of seven social network sites. An equally important section of the Digizen.org site addresses cyberbullying, with advice on how to "embed anti-bullying work in schools" and some powerful video teaching tools.