Teaching our children to lie
Published on Wednesday, the 2nd of November, 2011
My son is being encouraged to lie.It's a fairly regular occurrence around here, and I'm sure you've seen it yourself. It's that checkbox on the website you're visiting where you say "Yes, I am over X years of age".
My son is being encouraged to lie.
It's a fairly regular occurrence around here, and I'm sure you've seen it yourself. It's that checkbox on the website you're visiting where you say "Yes, I am over X years of age".
How could you not trust this child?
It's well-known that there are 10 year olds on Facebook, and everyone agrees that they lied to get those accounts, but nobody really cares much. Facebook don't care. Facebook just see another pair of eyeballs, and another node in their social graph, but actually Fraser, Max (and even Heather) aren't nodes on that particular graph.
Today's annoyance was that Fraser's Youtube account has been blocked.
That just seems silly. It's an open website where anyone can read pretty much anything, except that to have an account on there you have to be older than X years (I haven't bothered to discover how old X is - it's not relevant).
So it seems there's this website, worth many billions of dollars and these guys can only control the functionality available to signed up members with an "on/off" switch. Is it bad if under 12 year olds post comments in a public forum? Oh, we should not let them create accounts then. Is it bad if under 8 year olds see soft porn? Oh, if we stop them creating accounts they'll be safe from that! What about the 14 year old with the videos of her cat? Well we definitely, definitely don't want that!
That's ludicrous! Can these people not design a website to accept a child? Someone who might want to log into the website just like mummy and daddy do?
Then, when the honest child is logged in, perhaps the account can be linked to a parent's account, or perhaps it could just be restricted in different ways.
Let's see what they say an account on Youtube offers you:
- Subscribe to your favorite channels.
- Rent or purchase top Hollywood movies
- Save videos to watch later
- Get recommendations based on what you've watched
- Share videos you like on Facebook, Twitter, and more
- Find your Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail contacts on YouTube
- Watch private videos from friends and family
OK, so as far as I can see:
- Might be useful to any age person, and is entirely innocuous in the context of the
content of Youtube which is available to anonymous visitors of any age. - Well, Fraser wouldn't be able to pay, since he doesn't have anything to pay
with. I guess he could steal my credit card, but if he's already at that level
of skullduggery then some silly checkbox would be "child's play" to his lying
skillz. - Entirely innocuous.
- Seems pretty innocuous too.
- Presumably he wouldn't because 10 year old's can't have identities. And this
functionality could easily be restricted, in any case - And if there are no relationships, there are no friends. Maybe there is family,
which is fine, I guess. I think the risks here are controllable.
So there's plenty of value to a 10 year old in having an account. There's nothing that most reasonable parents would be concerned about, if there was a clear policy of limited functionality in place that parents could see and have confidence in.
The Youtube thing actually seems to be related to (maybe) to Google's recent push towards "identity". Children younger than X are not allowed to have an on-line identity, because they might run amok on the intarwebs. Or see scary stuff. Or something.
And yet, by denying them an account, they are removing any ability to actually apply a level of control that reflects the presumed maturity (since, after all, age is no more a direct measure of maturity than height).
Truly though, what totally pisses me off about this situation, is that Fraser associated a bunch of channels with his Youtube account, and he receives a weekly digest of the activity.
Unfortunately we can't log in to turn it off.
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If I recall correctly,
If I recall correctly, there's a law in America that prohibits companies from storing any information about children under the age of 13 without their guardians' consent. Turns out, it's much easier to add a "Yes, I'm older than 13" checkbox to the sign-up form than it is to actually figure out whether any particular account needs approval, figure out who that account's guardians are, contact them and ask for permission.
Yes sticking the field on there is an easy cop out.
But it's still a cop out.
For example if they put the field on there that says "Are you over 13?" and unless you checked that field you got an account that was suitably emasculated to be able to be used by minors.
What are these sites saying to our children? "Sod off, kid, and don't come back until we can usefully exploit your social graph"!
I'm talking about websites that have teams of development staff that number in the hundreds, but this particular cop-out is endemic.
That's quite a lot of work to
That's quite a lot of work to support users who (with notable exceptions) don't necessarily provide as much value.
An investment in the future
is how most companies look at such things. If those kids go somewhere else with better features then you're going to have to attract them back later, and that's a much harder job.
Laws
I think you may want to read up on COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. For children under 13 years of age they'd need to get a verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information. The companies in question don't want to bother about that. (And funny enough a click-wrap is obviously sufficient, considering that most sites, including various forum software, do just that.)
The law is not a high bar
I don't believe the law is that high a bar on this. There are plenty of websites that do allow my children to set up accounts. They're places like Poptropica, Disney and UpToTen, and they take a few special measures to make sure they don't fall afoul of the law.
So if they can do it, why can't Google?
What do they do to get
What do they do to get verifiable parental consent?
Typically an e-mail exchange
Typically they request a parent's e-mail address and create an account for the parent who then authorize the child as well.
Possibly they are working around the law, by creating accounts for adults, who then let their children use the account. I think there are a few different approaches though.
New gadgets will blur the line, too. How many tablet apps let you share information? Track your behaviour? Seen the new iPad case from Mattel?
Laws
There's an interesting article related to this linked from Bruce Schneier's blog:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/11/underage_childr.html
An awesome link there, thanks
And the article he refers to along with the journal article it is based on are both excellent reading.
Some COPPA links
There's some info at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013103.html#563421 on exactly what the most difficult provisions of COPPA are:
1. the need to have a telephone contact for parents to reach the company
2. the need to write a detailed description of the potential for children to reveal private information about themselves (apparently saying "it's limitless" is not a good answer)
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/11/01/parents-survey-coppa.html has some interesting comments.
The provisions may soon get
The provisions may soon get stricter too, for example, parental permission needed for kids to play games that geolocate them, or some advertising to them. There's also a proposal to remove the "email with a confirmation step" parental agreement method.
http://www.adotas.com/2011/09/what-ftcs-coppa-revisions-mean-for-advertisers-pubs-and-mobile-developers/
So what's so scary...
... about the information that Youtube collects on logged in visitors that they couldn't have special features on children's accounts to handle all this?
I expect that Youtube know who my kids are, and track them already, but have plausible deniability because they're not logged in. Is that information of too much economic benefit to be able to throw away if they let them have a login?
It's limitless...
What, like Wikipedia?
"Sod off, kid, and don't come
"Sod off, kid, and don't come back until we can usefully exploit your social graph".
I'd say you answered your own question. The sites are 'free' because they profit through advertising[1], commercial exploitation of personal data[2], and forcing users to turn their 'social' lives into content[3], to feed the big worldwide reality soap opera.
[1] the most profitable kind would be aimed at users that hold a credit card, or might apply for one; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7395344.stm
[2] perhaps prohibitively expensive to collect whilst in compliance of privacy laws protecting minors in some countries
[3] much of this would be considered adult content anyway, and somewhat difficult to filter/review if it is real-time user-generated; https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inappropriate_content_controversies
So basically you think that
So basically you think that the average IQ of Facebook users is not low enough and we have to dillute it even further by adding ten year olds into the mix?
No. Just no.
Please keep your dumb children away from the Internet.
Lowering the IQ
I don't know about your friends, but before I closed my Facebook account down I think the average IQ of my Facebook acquaintances was around 130.
In any case I'm not (on this occasion) talking about Facebook. I'm talking about a website that lets people find and watch video content, and which offers a few small additional features to people who have accounts. Most of those features could be offered to users without even requiring an account, by storing a small cookie on their computer to retain (e.g.) saved video IDs.
As for keeping my "dumb" children away from the internet...
Trolling aside, how do you expect children to grow into adults other than through gaining experience? Do you want everyone to be the identical product of some factory-like school system? It's not like they turn 13 and suddenly a switch is flipped and they are adults, or 16, or 18, or 21.
My kids have been "on" the internet since they were at school, and Fraser has been writing a blog as part of his schoolwork for a couple of years. Maybe you missed the memo but we're in a new millennium now.
Just another reason to
Just another reason to support federated web tools, like statusnet and mediagoblin. Set up your own instance, and enjoy freedom!