Cleaning up a checkered digital past

I hope this doesn't sound familiar to any of your kids: "A recent college grad with a distinctive last name would like to get rid of an entry on someone else's long-abandoned online journal. The entry mentions her full name in a rambling tale of drug-induced debauchery and sexual high jinks. It always shows up as the fourth or fifth result in a Google search on her name" - a problem, since she's now trying to get a job, reports Computerworld, referring to this as a real-life example. Basically, people have four options in cleaning up their online image: 1) Find and appeal to the person who posted the photos and associated text, 2) file an abuse report or take-down request with the site hosting that profile or blog entry, 3) pay a service such as ReputationDefender.com or ReputationHawk.com to do the above sort of legwork for you, and/or 4) create search-engine-friendly Web pages about yourself and/or a blog that push the negative stuff down in the search results. ComputerWorld offers a lot more detail, as well as other tough reputation scenarios, so check it out. The good news is, the above, fairly typical reputation situation has a pretty good chance of getting deleted. The bad news in the article was that ComputerWorld's reporters, who tried the do-it-yourself approach themselves, ended up with no idea of who among all the contacts they pursued actually got those images taken down.

Cleaning up a checkered digital past

I hope this doesn't sound familiar to any of your kids: "A recent college grad with a distinctive last name would like to get rid of an entry on someone else's long-abandoned online journal. The entry mentions her full name in a rambling tale of drug-induced debauchery and sexual high jinks. It always shows up as the fourth or fifth result in a Google search on her name" - a problem, since she's now trying to get a job, reports Computerworld, referring to this as a real-life example. Basically, people have four options in cleaning up their online image: 1) Find and appeal to the person who posted the photos and associated text, 2) file an abuse report or take-down request with the site hosting that profile or blog entry, 3) pay a service such as ReputationDefender.com or ReputationHawk.com to do the above sort of legwork for you, and/or 4) create search-engine-friendly Web pages about yourself and/or a blog that push the negative stuff down in the search results. ComputerWorld offers a lot more detail, as well as other tough reputation scenarios, so check it out. The good news is, the above, fairly typical reputation situation has a pretty good chance of getting deleted. The bad news in the article was that ComputerWorld's reporters, who tried the do-it-yourself approach themselves, ended up with no idea of who among all the contacts they pursued actually got those images taken down.

200 virtual worlds for kids

That's virtual worlds for youth that are now "live, planned, or in active development," according to Virtual Worlds Management. In its coverage, CNET reports that "the under-7 market (if there is such a thing) is the most heavily targeted with 107 worlds aiming for market share," with "the teen market ... relatively wide open." Virtual Worlds Management also found an increase in virtual worlds aimed at families with kids 3+, CNET says. The array of countries where these "worlds" are based is amazing: Besides North America, they're in Spain, China, Ukraine, France, Israel, Hong Kong, Denmark, Singapore, Japan, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, and Poland - virtually all linked to from the Virtual Worlds Management page above.

Data privacy: Be extra alert these days

This is timely news, since yesterday the United States, Canada, and 27 European celebrated the third-annual Data Protection Day (see Computer Weekly). Computer security experts are saying that cybercriminals are taking advantage of "the fear and confusion created by tumbling financial markets" with a "massive wave of schemes to steal people's personal data," USATODAY reports. Panda Security told the paper that the number of malicious software programs circulating around the Net "tripled to more than 31,000 a day in mid-September, coinciding with the sudden collapse of the US financial sector." What to be on the alert for: ads, emails, IMs, bulletins, comments, etc. promoting anti-virus programs, get-rich-quick opps, funny or suggestive videos, etc. - basically everything. Just be on the alert and tell your kids it's just good to be skeptical about messages that make something sound really good or interesting. There really is something to "think before you click." [See also "Beware of Facebook 'Friends' Who May Trash Your Laptop" in a Wall Street Journal blog.]

Pennsylvania case study: Social-networking risk in context

This is interesting in light of criticism by state attorneys general of the peer-reviewed research in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report this month: a just-released study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU). The attorneys general have said the research is outdated (it's actually not, but see the Wall Street Journal) and not enough about predators in social-network sites, so study author Nancy Willard analyzed some data that couldn't be more current: all online predator arrests in Pennsylvania from 2005 through the middle of this month, cited in press releases in Attorney General Tom Corbett's Web site.

In a recent statement, General Corbett said, "I believe this [Task Force] report is incredibly misleading.... The threat is real.... In the last four years, my office has arrested 183 predators, all of whom have used the Internet for the purpose of contacting minors to engage in sexual activity."

No one - in the Task Force report, the research community, or certainly the online-safety field - disagrees that online predation is a risk, and all agree that the attorneys general are performing an important public service in reducing Internet-initiated predation. The risk does need to be put into context, though. A whole lot of parents (those of the 65% of US teens with social-network profiles, according to Pew/Internet) would really like to know how dangerous social networking actually is, since it's so much a part of their kids' lives now.

Willard's analysis looks at 1) Internet-related child sexual exploitation in context (what proportion of overall exploitation involves even the Internet, much less a single social technology on it) and 2) social networking in the context of all online social technologies teens use - chat, IM, etc.

Internet-related child sexual abuse in Pa.

During one year (FY '06-'07) Pennsylvania rape crisis centers and sexual assault programs served 9,934 child victims of sexual abuse, Willard reports.

Over four years (2005 through ’08), the Pennsylvania attorney general's office made 183 arrests concerning Internet-related child sexual abuse through its Child Predator Unit.

Only 8 of the 183 cases involved actual minors (the rest were sting operations involving police posing as minors) - though certainly these arrests may've prevented cases involving minors.

Only 5 of the 183 involved sexual contact.

The only national figure we have is from 2000, when the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that 508 out of 65,000 child sexual exploitation cases were Internet-initiated (where offender and victim "met" for the first time online). [An update from the CACRC is expected to be released soon.]

Social networking compared to other Net technologies

Willard writes that, "because the attorneys general have been focusing their attention on the social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, this analysis gave special attention to any case that mentioned any activity occurring on either of these two sites." She found that:

144 of the sting operations involved chat, 11 instant messaging, and 9 unspecified in the press releases; the rest were cases of child porn possession.

Only one case involved both a teenager and MySpace, "a re-arrest of a person who had already been arrested through a sting," Willard reports.

One case involved a police officer committing child sex crimes: He "was arrested for sexual abuse of many teens with whom he had interacted in the line of duty. [He] also had a MySpace account with links to teen girls, but there was no assertion that these communications had led to sexual activity."

"One predator in a sting provided the agent with a link to his Facebook page," Willard writes.

"In 5 of the stings that took place in a chat room [no minor involved], reference was made to the fact that the predator had either looked at the 'teen’s' MySpace profile or suggested the 'teen' look at his account."

And the Child Predator Unit itself has, since November 2006, "maintained one or more public sting profiles [depicting teens] on MySpace," but in four years not one arrest has occurred as a result of communications through its fake teen MySpace profiles.

What Willard concluded was that, though a single state's arrests are not a representative sample, "the arrest reports on the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s site fully support the insight and conclusions of the Berkman Task Force Research Advisory Board. The incidents of online sexual predation are rare. Far more children and teens are being sexually abused by family members and acquaintances.... It appears that chat rooms are far less safe than social networking sites and that there is limited inclination and ability of predators to use social networking sites to contact potential teen victims.

"However," she notes, "some predators are apparently looking at non-protected social networking profiles to obtain more information about victims," and more research on the secondary role social and media-sharing sites might be playing is needed. The attorneys general are right - we need more granular understanding of how predators operate - and we can only get that when they make their case records available to the research community. By law, the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, Internet service providers (including social sites) can't share data on users' communications without a subpoena or other court instrument. Once that subpoena has been served, for example by an attorney general's office, that information can be made public. Let's hope the attorneys general, who didn't provide predator data to the Task Force researchers whose report they're criticizing, can soon make it available to the research community.

Let's broaden the discussion

But online crime needs to be seen in context too. Crime must be addressed, but so much of what is happening online - including among teens, of course - is good. Or neutral. Or bad but not necessarily criminal. Increasingly, the Web mirrors all of "real life." Our kids deserve more from parents than fear about it and from the rest of us than overemphasis on crime.

I like the metaphor used by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, a nonprofit organization in New York that does a lot of educational work with youth in virtual worlds. Referring to Teen Second Life, an all-teen virtual world that may merge with the main SL world, he writes, "Why is it important for youth to have their own community? How is this different from a focus on keeping youth safe? The difference is that keeping youth safe, while a desired goal, sells everyone short. Youth deserve support to access their inherent abilities to fully participate in society.

"Let's take the example of a playground," Joseph continues. "What makes a playground safe? Recreational equipment that isn't broken, for example. Barriers to keep out drug dealers or predatory adults. Authority figures to police the space. How would this playground change if it were redesigned to not just keep youth safe but also support their development? The recreational equipment would be selected with an eye toward their developmental impact, such as supporting collaboration or creative play.... The authority figure would do more than just watch and observe but get actively involved, building supporting relationships with the youth, and offer activities designed to engage and develop their abilities."

How might our kids' experience of the social Web change if we were to redesign our collective thinking about it and them - if we saw them less as potential victims and more as participants in and producers of a digital place they can help make safe?

Related links

"How risky are social networking sites?", by Michele Ybarra and Kimberly Mitchell in the journal Pedatrics: "Our findings suggest that 15% of all youth report being targeted by unwanted sexual solicitation, 4% in a social networking site specifically. Similarly, 32.5% of youth report being harassed, either by threats or aggressive comments, or having rumors spread about them," 9% while on a social networking site specifically. "Youth are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social networking sites than they are through IM and in chat rooms, however, and are less likely to be a target of harassment on social networking sites than they are through IM."

For even more context (and a view from Washington), head over to Adam Thierer's blog, TechLiberationFront.com.

"New study challenges attorneys general on predator danger," by Larry Magid of CBS/CNET and ConnectSafely.org

"Social networking benefits validated" in the Washington Times

"Serious informal learning: Key online youth study" in NetFamilyNews

"Greatest Internet threat to teens may be teens themselves" - best coverage of Task Force report in the mainstream media I've seen, appropriately in the Los Angeles Times's Health section

"Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released," my thoughts on the Task Force report

ISTTF report

Britain's 'child protection database'

This is what some in the UK call "child protection"? The BBC reports that "a child protection database" containing "the name, address, parents' contact details, date of birth, school, and doctor of every child in England" is being established "to improve information-sharing between professionals working with children." It will be accessible to 390,000 people described in the article as "local authorities, police, health services, and children's charities." Parents will not be allowed to remove their children's information from the database, the BBC adds. Children's Minister Baroness Morgan said "there will be provision for 'shielding' the details of young people facing risk if they were identified," the BBC reports. It says Conservatives attacked the £224m ($315.5 million) database as "another expensive data disaster waiting to happen," leading one to wonder if anyone remembers that UK database security breach in 2007 that jeopardized the personal information of "virtually every child in Britain" (see my item on this). [Thanks to QuickLinks for pointing this news out.]

Friending Mom or Dad?

I had a feeling that at least some of social networking's growth had to do with parents joining to learn about this huge presence in their kids' lives. Now the Pew Internet Project has some data at least on grownups, if not parents. "The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social-networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years - from 8% in 2005 to 35% now," Pew reports. A few interesting observations from Social Computing Magazine's coverage of the Pew study: Like teens, adults use social sites to communicate with people they already know (89%), and most have profiles in multiple sites (51%). Among US users 18+, MySpace is twice as popular as Facebook (50% compared to 22%). Here's the breakdown by age on who has social-network profiles: 75% of people 18-24; 57% 25-34; 30% 35-44; 19% 45-54; 10% 55-64; 7% 65+. Here, too, is Business Week's coverage, and the Washington Post talks about job-hunting with social sites.

New PC worm infecting millions

The New York Times called it the newest "digital plague." "Known as Conficker or Downadup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys," according to the Times, adding that experts are calling it the worst worm since the Slammer of 2003. Microsoft says there's no single solution to the problem, but it did issue a patch last October. Security experts told the Times that the worm's success was "due in part to lax security practices by both companies and individuals, who frequently do not immediately install updates." Washington Post computer security writer Brian Krebs has details on the worm's origins.

More than a billion Web users

The Web passed the 1 billion user mark last month, according to comScore. That's a billion Web site visitors aged 15+, using home and work computers, in the months of December. So - given the rapid rise in Web browsing and social networking via mobile phones (especially in Europe and Asia) - the number could well be higher. ComScore says "the Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41%, followed by Europe (28% percent), North America (18%), Latin-America (7%), and the Middle East & Africa (5%). Here's CNET's coverage, as well as an earlier post on MySpace and Facebook numbers.

Youth perspective essential

I've been reading social media scholar danah boyd's PhD dissertation, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics," the result of her 2.5-year enthnograpic study of how teens use social-network sites. The study is unique in a couple of ways: she was like an embedded reporter, not a data cruncher, and she approached her fieldwork very differently than most adults - "with the belief that the practices of teenagers must be understood on their own terms."

I think the perspective this approach brings is essential to understanding teen use of social networking, a medium so youth-driven - not the only perspective, just one very important one. Sure, the data crunchers of quantitative research ask young people questions, but those questions are generally formulated by adults. We can't sufficiently understand teen social networking when we view it through an adult lens. Just as always in parenting, but even more so now with our digital natives, we need multiple inputs - our own children's, that of current teen practices and behaviors in general, that of research where available, and that of the contexts (school, community, society) in which young people are growing up.

So the other day, when boyd was blogging about the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report released last week (she led its research team) and wrote, "I strongly believe that we need to stop talking about the Internet as the cause and start talking about it as the megaphone," she was referring to two perspectives. The adult view is that the Internet (or Net-based technologies such as social networking) is the cause, while the youth (and researchers') view is that it's more the amplifier of the problem. [Other distinguishing and destabilizing factors the Net brings to the mix, boyd says, are persistence and searchability (Net as permanent searchable archive), replicability (the ability to copy 'n' paste from one site or phone to another), scalability (that anything posted has high-visibility potential), invisible audiences (not always thought of before posting), collapsed contexts (lack of spatial and social boundaries), and the blurring of public and private (the one probably best-known to parents).]

The rest of boyd's post about the Task Force is really worth considering too: "The Internet makes visible how many kids are not ok. We desperately need an integrated set of compassionate solutions. Digital social workers are needed to reach out to troubled kids and guide them through the rough spots. Law enforcement is vital for tracking down dangerous individuals, but we need to fund them to investigate and prosecute. Parents and educators are desperately needed to be engaged and informed. Technical solutions are needed to support these different actors. But there is no magic silver bullet. The problems that exist cannot be solved by preventing adults from communicating with minors (and there are huge unintended consequences to that, including limiting social workers from helping kids), and they cannot be solved by filtering the content. It's also critical that we engage youth in the process because many of them are engaging in risky behaviors that put them in the line of danger because of external factors that desperately need to be addressed."

In that point, boyd's echoing the Task Force report's finding that children's psychosocial makeup and the conditions around them are better predictors of online risk face than what technology they use. [For more on the Task Force report, see "Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released."]

Restricting teen access: Unintended consequences

Age verification has been the potential online-safety solution of choice for state attorneys general. I know I've written about this plenty, but I have to add something that really struck me in reading all the technology submissions to the Internet Safety Technical Task Force: that the only way any of these technologies would really work for children is if their parents chose to use them. Only bottom-up, not top-down, adoption can really work. In other words, no government can effectively mandate their use because no government can control the global Internet or its global population of users. For example, if a government were somehow to restrict social networking only to adults, its restrictions could only affect social sites based in its country; its teens could simply go to social sites based in another country (there are so many English-language ones outside the US). This was a key factor cited in a recent European Commission report. But back to opt-in parental controls. There are many kinds - from filtering to monitoring to site moderation to ID-verification in specific sites for which parents sign up their kids. All of these can work for children with engaged, informed parents who know what's age-appropriate for each of their kids. They don't work very well for kids who aren't fortunate enough to have that kind of attentive parental support, kids who - for good or bad - find more support online than at home, if they even call it "home." Those are the youth recognized in the research summarized in the Task Force report as most at risk online as well as offline. Those are also the young people for whom age verification could have very negative unintended consequences. It's those possible consequences which have barely begun to be considered and about which my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I are concerned. We sent a memo about them to our fellow Task Force members (summarized on p. 262 of the full report, which can be downloaded at the site of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society) and which Larry delineated in his CNET blog.

Bad pirates to good pirates

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is reportedly the music industry's new modus operandi, and it's music pirates it was never quite able to beat. Though it certainly tried, with thousands of lawsuits and settlements out of court with file-sharers. "After years of futile efforts to stop digital pirates from copying its music, the music business has started to copy the pirates," the New York Times reports. "Free" music services offering millions of songs online and on phones are "set to proliferate" this year, it adds, bringing stiff competition to iTunes, whose music-sales growth ended last year. Customers' costs will be buried in mobile or Internet-service contracts. These music services are also different from file-sharing services like Limewire or eDonkey in that they're legal and provide revenue to the music companies. Two examples of the "free services": 1) Nokia's Comes With Music, which "lets users download as many songs as they want, from a catalog of more than five million tracks, when they buy certain Nokia phones" and 2) and the Isle of Man government's plan to require broadband Internet users to "pay a nominal monthly license fee" and thereby "legally download music from any source, even peer-to-peer services that are outlawed currently." At a music industry conference in Cannes, a Research in Motion executive predicted that "the music industry will be unrecognizable in a couple of years time," Reuters reports. Here's some background on the music industry in the Financial Times. Meanwhile, LimeWire - which has 70 million unique users and gets more than 5 billion queries a month - just added social-networking features to its service, CNET reports.

US 'reading on the rise'

The National Endowment for the Arts saw a significant upswing in adult reading in the research for its latest such study, "Reading on the Rise." This year's report, the NEA's fifth since 1982, "documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24," the NEA's press release says. It adds that this growth "reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports." Good news "at a time of immense cultural pessimism," NEA Chairman Dana Gioia pointed out. As for young adults, "since 2002, 18-to-24-year-olds have seen the biggest increase (9%) in literary reading, and the most rapid rate of increase (21%). This jump reversed a 20% rate of decline in the 2002 survey, the steepest rate of decline since the NEA survey began," the NEA says. And about online vs. offline reading, the survey found that "84% of adults who read literature (fiction, poetry, or drama) on or downloaded from the Internet also read books, whether print or online."

Tech parenting going forward

Just a heads-up on something that might be useful to parents: bNetS@vvy, a project of the National Educational Association Health Information Network, asked me to write "Net Savvy Parenting in the New Year: Five Things You Need to Know" for its Web site and newsletter. Here are two more things we can look forward to:

More and more virtual worlds. There are more than 150 kids' and teens' virtual worlds now or soon-to-be available, and all the videogame online services - Sony Home, Xbox Live, and Nintendo Wii's "Mii's" - have avatars moving around in some semblance of virtual worlds. This is a serious trend: fun, compelling, but - as with anything online - involving a certain degree of risk. Parents will want to look into what those avatars can look like and do (what state of dress or undress and what actions and communications they're allowed). See also "Top 8 work-arounds of kid virtual-world users."

More and more mobile. This can't be news to any parent with a kid hounding him or her for a cellphone. Unless the Web is blocked (as it can be by every major cellphone carrier), everything that's online is also on more and more phones - including social networking, blog posting, content uploading, media sharing, and video producing. But game consoles and media players are connected to the Net, too. So everything we online-safety advocates say about kids on the Web holds for kids on just about any other connected device too. Wherever they are, the Internet is - including friends' houses, where your rules don't apply.

[Along these (parenting) lines, see also a Live Discussion my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I had with parents at the Washington Post last month.]

App as parent-child talking point

Here's a good talking point for the tech part of parenting: Facebook Grader. It's a mini application ("app") that tells users their "reach and authority" on Facebook, TechCrunch.com reports. "The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means [maybe based on how many "friends" on their lists?]), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to." Billed as a profile grader, for some kids it may be more of an indicator of how cool, sought-after, or popular they are. So it could fuel a discussion about whether your child uses a grading or rating tool like this, what s/he likes about social-networking, what it's best for, whether something like Facebook Grader is really any indicator of what a good person s/he is, and what s/he feels (and you feel) the real indicators are or should be.

COPA laid to rest

Remember COPA, the Child Online Protection Act that was passed in 1998, a year after the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation concerning objectionable online content (the Communications Decency Act, or CDA)? COPA was blocked almost immediately on constitutional grounds by a federal court in Philadelphia, then bounced back and forth a couple of times between that court and the Supreme Court. The latter today rejected the Bush administration's appeal of the latest ruling in 2004, Yahoo News reports. "Five justices who ruled against the Internet blocking law in 2004 remain on the court. The case is Mukasey v. ACLU. 08-565," according to Yahoo News. Here's my earlier coverage on COPA.

Student free-speech decision

It may not be the last decision in a federal court on this case (Avery Doninger's lawyer said it may need to go to the Supreme Court). It was a mixed decision, reflecting how complicated student free-speech cases in the digital age are. In Doninger's case against Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., the Student Press Law Center reports, "US District Court Judge Mark Kravitz decided [Mills High School principal] Niehoff and Superintendent Paula Schwartz were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects 'public officials from lawsuits for damages, unless their actions violate clearly established rights'," the judge said in the ruling. Doninger, he said, hadn't clearly established her First Amendment right "to criticize her principal in an off-campus blog that used coarse language," the report added. Judge Kravitz cited two somewhat conflicting cases in his opinion: "Bethel School District v. Fraser, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a student's lewd and vulgar speech was not protected on-campus, and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which recognizes First Amendment protection for student speech on-campus as long as it does not substantially disrupt school, demonstrating a confusion among courts about which standard to apply to Internet student-speech cases," according to the Student Press Law Center. According to the Associated Press, the judge did let stand Doninger's claim that her right to free speech was "chilled" when the school "prohibited students from wearing T-shirts that read 'Team Avery' to a student council election assembly. That matter can proceed to trial."

Inaugural links

So many smiles, teary eyes, and teachable moments were captured in the music, poem, prayers, and remarks of our 44th President's inauguration, and now it's all on the Web for classrooms and family discussions. Within minutes of President Obama finishing his inaugural address, it was up on YouTube, with its full text printable at Time.com. Here's video of poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander reading her inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day," as well as the full text at NowPublic.com and a Q&A with her at Time. Don't miss Aretha Franklin and John Williams's composition played by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Anthony McGill, and Gabriela Montero on YouTube with Chinese subtitles and on Breitbart.tv (looks like NBC footage). Because stories are powerful teachers, here's "One's family's long road [from Selma, Ala.] to the Obama inauguration" in the Christian Science Monitor, with its subhead: "Frankie Hutchins, whose grandmother was born into slavery, saw her mother fight for voting rights. She attended a white school" and today her children saw and heard the first black president. Finally, it seems fitting to include Rev. Joseph Lowery's inaugural benediction on video at YouTube.

Inauguration through young eyes

From a virtual inaugural ball in WeeWorld to young reporters' covering the real thing in Washington, there are lots of resources for young people themselves to observe or participate in this historic moment. YPulse provides a collection of links, listed by age group. For teens and 20-somethings, MTV and ServiceNation teamed up with the Presidential Inaugural Committee to produce and air the Youth Inaugural Ball starting at 10pm tomorrow (Tuesday) night, TVWeek.com reports. And CNN and Facebook are presenting social/new-media-style coverage of the event, HollywoodReporter reports. As for social-Web users of any age, USATODAY reports that the Obama inauguration "will arguably be the biggest live social-networking event ever in one location."

The 'weak ties' that bind

Of course, young social networkers at your house already know all about "weak ties" - they just call them something else: their social-network "friends." Some of them are friends in real life, some just friends of friends, kind of second-tier friends, or somebody they met at the last away game. It's just helpful to have a fellow adult explain what friends in social-network sites are like from a sociologist's perspective. That's what Julia Angwin at the Wall Street Journal does. These weak ties can really come in handy in these crazy economic times, as well as when one's looking for a summer job or a prom date for her visiting cousin. "Weak ties are particularly good for job searching," Angwin reports, citing the view of a Stanford sociology professor, "because acquaintances can expose a job candidate to a much wider range of possibilities than his or her close friends can." Check out the article for more on the value of weak ties. But remember this is a very adult discussion, wherein the "friends" in social sites are viewed in a different, more casual and detached, way than among young social networkers. For a sense of that greater intensity, see "The pain of 'unfriending'" in the Digital Natives project's blog at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

For kids, gaming over music

A new study by market researcher NPD Group found that 85% of children aged 2-14 use game consoles, and 82% of 2-to-5-year-olds play games on one or more devices, while 60% use digital music players, Gamasutra reports. NPD's Kids & Digital Content III report, which surveyed more than 3,500 kids who use electronic devices, also found that a third of the 2-to-14-year-olds watch videos such as movies and online video clips on laptops or other electronic devices, and 22% download ringtones on their cellphones. Here's more on the NPD report from Gamespy. Meanwhile, in a keynote speech at CES, Mike Griffith, CEO of Guitar Hero maker Activision, "proclaimed that video games are 'poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the decade ahead'," the BBC reports. "He quoted US market statistics which showed that between 2003 and 2007 sales of movie tickets fell by 6%; the number of hours of TV watched dropped by 6%, sales of recorded music slumped 12% and purchases of DVDs remained flat.

3rd Guitar Hero 1st to beat $1 billion

Not only has the Guitar Hero videogame series surpassed $1 billion. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock itself has, GameDaily reports. It, too, reported on Activision CEO Mike Griffith's keynote at the giant CES show in Las Vegas last week, citing his statement that "the videogame industry has had a profound effect on other entertainment sectors, and that Guitar Hero in particular has been hugely important to the music industry." Evidence: Griffith cited Nielsen data showing that "artists whose music was playable in Guitar Hero had seen download sales increase 15-843%." The newest Guitar Hero game allows players to compose their own songs. Activision data claims that in the game's first 10 days, 141,000 songs were posted by players, and the Guitar Hero community site has more than 600,000 members. "To date, there have been 21 million user-song downloads."

AG says ISTTF 'creates false sense of security'

Attorney General Henry McMaster "has withdrawn from a group studying the problem of Internet predators on social-networking sites after a report downplayed threats that children face online," CarolinaLive.com reports. It says McMaster withdrew, presumably from the group of attorneys general that formed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, because the ISTTF report's findings "create a 'false sense of security on the issue of child Internet safety'." The report, "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies," can be downloaded from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's site. One of the criticisms voiced by the attorneys general in this interview in the Wall Street Journal is that the research cited by the ISTTF report is dated. In fact, the Research Advisory Board pulled together all online-safety research published through this past year, when the ISTTF report was being written. If data is not in there, especially the information on criminal activity the attorneys general are calling for, it's data that the research community is waiting for law enforcement people to make available. Let's hope the attorneys general will help fill in whatever gaps in the research they're referring to.

Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released

Online safety has reached a major crossroads, here in the US. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force's report is being released tonight, and to me (a Task Force member), it represents a stark choice all stakeholders have going forward: continue down the road of fear-based online-safety education or together match all messaging to what the research says - be fear-based or fact-based.

Having observed and participated in this field for more than 11 years, I think it's understandable how we got here. The US's public discussion, fueled by mostly negative media coverage, has been dominated by law enforcement. Starting in the mid-'90s, police departments representing the only really accessible, on-location expertise in online safety, filled an information vacuum. They and members of the growing number of state Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces were the people who spoke to schoolkids and parents about how to stay safe online, and their talks, naturally, were largely informed by criminal cases. When online-safety education is carried out by experts in crime - those who see the worst uses of the Internet on a daily basis - fear is often the audience's take-away. That's not to say there aren't amazing youth-division officers who really understand children and technology giving online-safety talks - there are, we have one, Det. Frank Dannahey in Connecticut, on our Advisory Board - but their voices have so far been drowned out by the predator panic the American public has been saddled with.

Meanwhile, over the past decade, a broad spectrum of research has been published about both online youth risk and young people's general everyday use of all kinds of Internet technologies, fixed and mobile. And now it's all reviewed and summarized in this report (downloadable here), one of three major accomplishments of the Task Force, the other two being the national-level discussion it represented, involving key stakeholders, and that it acknowledges the international nature of the Internet, essential to any policy discussion about it.

One of the researchers' most important findings - information really helpful to parents, finally - is that a child's psychosocial makeup and the conditions surrounding him are more important predictors of online risk than the technology he uses. Not every child is equally at risk of anything online, including predation. The research shows 1) only a tiny minority of online youth are at risk of sexual exploitation resulting from Net activity, and these are at-risk kids in "real life," and 2) online risk of all forms - inappropriate behavior, content or contact, by peers or adults - has been present through all phases of the Web and all interactive technologies kids use; it doesn't show up only in social-network sites. It's rooted in user behavior, not in crime.

As an online-safety advocate who talks to parents all the time, I kept wanting to say to the attorneys general - since they announced their online-safety prescription, age verification, 2.5 years ago at a DC conference on social-networking I attended - that focusing solely on predation, or crime, doesn't help parents. Parents need the full picture - all the risk factors and danger signs, the positives and neutrals, too, not just the negatives - in order to guide their kids.

I think any parent gets why the full picture is needed. Most parents know they can't afford to be like deer in the headlights, paralyzed by the scary evidence coming from those focused on crime (and those covering them in the media). Kids sensing irrational fear want to get as far away as possible. They know it can cause parents to overreact and, based on misinformation, shut down the perceived source of danger. That sends them underground, where much-needed parental involvement and back-up isn't around. How, I kept wanting to ask the AGs, who are parents themselves, does that reduce online kids' risk? To young people, taking away the Internet is like taking away their social lives, and there are too many ways kids can sneak away - to overseas sites beyond the reach of any US regulation, to irresponsible US sites that don't work with law enforcement, to and with other technologies, devices, and hot spots parents don't know about it - including friends' houses, where their rules don't apply.

Certainly the attorneys general have played an important watchdog role, here in a country where a discussion about industry best practices hasn't even begun. Now, with the release of a full research summary maybe that discussion can start. That's possible because, with a national report that says the most common risk kids face is online bullying and harassment - bad behavior, not crime (and their own aggressive behavior more than doubles their risk of victimization) - and with the Task Force's technical advisers concluding that no single technology can solve the whole problem "or even one aspect of it 100% of the time," we're moving closer to a calm, rational societal understanding of the problem - the Task Force ended up working toward a diagnosis rather than filling a prescription for one of the (certainly scariest) symptoms.

With the release of the Task Force report, online safety as we know it is obsolete. The report lays out more than enough reasons to take a fact-based approach to protecting online kids - to stop seeing and portraying them almost exclusively as potential victims and work with them, as citizens and drivers of the social Web, toward making it a safer, more civil and constructive place to learn, play, produce and socialize.

Related links

The ISTTF report download page - with links to PDFs of the full report, executive summary, research summary, and all other appendices

"Net threat to minors less than feared" from my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid at CNET

"Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown" in the New York Times

"Internet Child Safety Report Finds No Easy Technology Fix" in the Wall Street Journal

Over in the UK, "Bullying biggest online threat to children" at the Financial Times

"Teen frustrated that parents restrict access to social-networking sites" in the Lawrence (Ks.) Journal-World

Past blog posts on age verification in NetFamilyNews

Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'

Kids' use of games, cellphones, and smartphones (next-generation, Web-browsing, media-sharing phones), "if carefully managed, could significantly boost their learning," Education Week reports, citing a just-released, 52-page study by a research center based at the Sesame Workshop (formerly Sesame Street) in New York. "Mobile devices are part of the fabric of children's lives today: They are here to stay,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, in a statement about the report. "It is no longer a question of whether we should use these devices to support learning, but how and when to use them." Among the report's recommendations are "investments in research and development aimed at understanding the impact of mobile technologies on children’s learning and development, including brain and behavioral functioning" and "a digital teacher corps that would train other teachers and after-school caregivers to use digital media to promote 21st-century literacy." Here's the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's blog, with links to the executive summary and full report in pdf format.

Porn on iPhones

"If one thing is clear, porn on iPhones is going to be huge," reports CNET blogger Daniel Terdiman from the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas (which runs simultaneously with the giant Consumer Electronics Show there). He qualified that slightly by saying that, although "there don't seem to be any porn-related apps available for the iPhone, there is a plethora of adult entertainment available on the Web, and a growing amount of that content is being optimized for Apple's hit device." A Google search for "iPhone porn" returns millions of results. Executives from Digital Playground, a leading international porn producer, described their latest technological advances to Terdiman, adding that the iPhone is "a very big piece of the puzzle." So far, Digital Playground told the CNET blogger it has made 300 full-length films for the iPhone.

UK students suspended for defaming teacher

Nearly 30 students were suspended for joining a Facebook group that disparaged a teacher at their school, a highly rated Church of England girls school, The Telegraph reports. A teachers' union called for their expulsion. The school's head teacher "said the vast majority of parents who had been to see her about the incident were supportive and understood why she had taken firm disciplinary action. But some of the pupils who received temporary exclusions have claimed that the punishment was too harsh." The Telegraph quotes students as saying members of the group had apologized but that the school took the comments about the teacher more seriously than they were meant. The group has been deleted from Facebook, but The Telegraph reports that "disparaging comments about the teacher remain posted on another website." At the end of the article it quotes several students and a former student as saying the teacher treats students demeaningly. In the US, incidents like this don't always end with school discipline. They sometimes lead to lawsuits about students' First Amendment rights, the latest such reported last month: "Student sues principal on free-speech grounds." See also a law professor on students' free-speech rights and "Free speech and student blogging."

Data breaches way up

Whether or not age verification would help keep kids safe online, as state attorneys general suggest, it would require the collection of children's personal information into some database(s) somewhere. Consider that possibility against the news of where we are with the security of personal information in databases right now. "Businesses, governments and educational institutions reported nearly 50% more data breaches last year than in 2007, exposing the personal records of at least 35.7 million Americans," the Washington Post reports, citing a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center of San Diego. Nearly 37% of the breaches happened at businesses and about 20% at schools, the Center found. See also "Social networker age verification revisited" and "Europe on age verification, social networking."

Top 10 'social media sites'

That's what TechCrunch wisely calls them, as it looks at the latest available comScore traffic figures (November) for "social networking sites." ComScore includes blog-hosting, media-sharing, and pre-social-Web community sites in that category, though, so "social media" works much better. Google's Blogger - which hosts blogs, of course - is No. 1 (with 222 million unique visitors in November, up 44% from '07). The rest of the top 10 are: Facebook (200 million); MySpace (126 million); Wordpress blogs (114 million); Windows Live Spaces (blogs - down 22% to 87 million this year); Yahoo GeoCities (69 million); Flickr photo-sharing (64 million); Hi5 (No. 1 social site in Latin America - 58 million); Google's Orkut (social-networking site that's huge in Brazil - 46 million); and SixApart (blog-hosting - 46 million). Two China-based sites, Baidu Space and 56.com, were in the 11th and 13th spots, respectively. [See also "Latin America's social Web."]

More and more state cyberbullying laws

At least 13 US states have passed laws requiring school districts to develop policies on cyberbullying, the Washington Post reports, and "a handful of other states" are considering the same. Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, and Washington are among those with laws already in place, and California just joined them at the turn of the year, San Francisco's KCBS radio reported. Developing cyberbullying policy is not easy for schools because of the need to balance students' protection with their free-speech rights. Such policymaking becomes a problem, civil liberties advocates say, when schools "try to control what students say outside of school," the Post reports. Where they can step in, courts have said, is when what students post off-campus disrupts the learning process at school or causes peers to avoid going to school out of fear. "John Halligan, whose son Ryan took his life in Essex Junction, Vt., after many years of bullying, some online, applauded the national movement to enact cyber-bullying laws. But, he said, laws alone cannot stop the problem," according to the Post. See also "Cyberbullying better defined," "Teaching students to help stop cyberbullying," and "Anti-cyberbullying teachable moment."

Czech government takes on cyberbullying

An online clip of a teacher slapping a student is what sparked a nationwide debate about cyberbullying in the Czech Republic, the BBC reports. "The clip, which appeared on the Internet in June, showed a teacher telling a boy off for having a messy desk and then smacking him when he answered back," according to a Radio Prague report. It's not clear from the BBC piece whether the Czech public felt it was the teacher or the student who posted the clip who was doing the bullying, but the Education Ministry told the BBC that "some Czech children have attempted to blackmail teachers or classmates by posting video clips of them on the Internet." The Ministry has now issued cyberbullying guidelines for teachers that go beyond "simply confiscating mobile phones or banning their use during classes."

Sexual bullying in UK schools

Some 3,500 students were suspended and 140 expelled from school last year for sexual misconduct - "anything from sexualised name-calling to spreading rumours about someone's sexual behaviour, to criminal offences such as assault and rape," the BBC reports. The problem is on the increase, the Times Online reports, citing the experience of Kidscape, a British nonprofit organization that operates a bullying helpline. The helpline has gone from three calls a year about sexual bullying to the current average of three calls a week, Kidscape says. The government has "asked the Anti Bullying Alliance to draw up guidance for teachers on tackling sexual bullying," The Independent reports. "The guidance will tackle inappropriate language, advise teachers on how to manage cases of harassment, and encourage healthy friendships between teenage boys and girls amid concerns of misogynistic attitudes linked to gang culture.

Japan's mobile bullying problem

Mobile phone bullying is on the rise in Japan, where some 96% of high school students own mobile phones, and the country's Education Ministry is proposing a nationwide ban on cellphones at school. "Nearly 6,000 incidents of mobile phone-related bullying were reported in schools last year, a rise of more than 1,000 compared with the previous year," The Telegraph reports, citing Japanese government data. "The panel also proposed mobile phone companies install public payphones in schools and introduce function limitations on mobile devices while parents establish domestic rules regulating phone usage." An 18-year-old student in Kobe committed suicide last summer "after classmates posted a nude photo of him on a Web site alongside his name and telephone number before sending emails demanding money," and the governor of Osaka has already banned mobile phones in his prefecture's schools. "Japan has the largest mobile phone market in the world, with annual sales of 50 million phones," according to The Telegraph, which adds that about a third of all elementary school students own mobile phones. As for bullying in general, in the US, every day some 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied, The Coloradoan reports in "Positive relationships end bullying." In the UK, 48% of 10-to-15-year-olds have been "verbally or physically abused in the last year," The Telegraph reports, citing findings from a survey of 150,000 kids by education watchdog Ofsted. See also USATODAY's "Bullying victimization devastates lives ... until victims find ways to heal."

Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study

A professor of pediatrics said she was a little surprised by how much information about risky behaviors teens post online - information for all to see but that their doctors struggle to get out of them. In a random selection of 500 MySpace profiles of people who say on their pages they're 18, Dr. Megan Moreno at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her co-authors found that "54% of the profiles contained information on risky behaviors" - 24% of them about sexual behaviors, 41% about substance abuse, and 14% about violence, the Washington Post reports, citing a just-released study in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"The good news," the Post says, citing a second study by the same researchers, "is that a simple intervention - in this case, an email from a physician - made some of the teens change their risky behaviors" - a significant number, in fact. For their second study, described in the same medical journal article, the authors sent emails to half of the owners of 190 randomly selected MySpace profiles of people saying they were 18-20. They were signed by Dr. Moreno. "She called herself 'Dr. Meg,' identified herself as an adolescent medicine doctor and researcher, and urged them to check out her academic Web page," the Boston Globe reports in its coverage of the studies. "'You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking,' the message said. 'Are you sure that's a good idea? After all, if I could see it, nearly anybody could.' The message invited them to consider revising their profiles to protect their privacy. It also raised concerns about sexually transmitted diseases and pointed them to a Web site offering free testing."

And the response was? "Three months later, 42.1% of the ones who received the email had changed their profiles, dropping references to sex and substance use or moving their profiles from public to private," the Globe reports. So does the New York Times in "A Note to the Wise on MySpace Helps."

That's great news. Besides rules and tools, which not all teens respond to positively, other means of changing risky behavior are emerging, such as this kind of targeted, relevant educational messaging and social norming (peers' positive influence, as illustrated in a substance-abuse-prevention program at University of Virginia, Charlottesville). I think, as did Dr. Moreno, we need to get past the surprise adults have at teen risky behavior online. It's not new, it's just more public (which is a problem these studies help address), and it's actually developmental behavior, since neurologists tell us that the part of the brain that understands cause and effect and the implications of actions, the frontal cortex, isn't fully developed till people are in their early-to-mid-20s. Which is why, child development specialists say, risk assessment is a primary task of adolescence (and why adult guidance needs to be in the picture).

There's a lot more good thinking expressed or linked to in the Globe article, including:

The view from Dr. Michael Rich of Children's Hospital Boston that "social-networking sites [are] venues where young people channel their images and ideas, connecting with peers as they try on different identities - the way their parents might have done on the telephone. Where they can get into trouble is believing what they put on their profiles remains anonymous, outside their circle of friends," the Globe paraphrases him as saying. See also related articles in this same (January '09) issue of Archives, including It also links to an editorial in the same issue of Archives by the study's other authors he said.

The view that "using such sites [e.g., MySpace] to promote health messages is promising," in "Social Networking Sites: Finding a Balance Between Their Risks and Benefits," an editorial by Dr. Kimberly J. Mitchell of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids (in this same latest issue of Archives).

More than 90% of US teens have Net access, and about half of those use social-network sites, USATODAY reported in its coverage of the studies. Citing background information in the Archives article, the Post added that "MySpace boasts more than 200 million profiles, according to the studies, and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18."

Related links

"Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress," National Institute of Mental Health , and "The Teenage Brain," Frontline, PBS .

The Internet effect: What about the Net is actually changing the equation now, what distinguishes socializing online through sharing comments, photos, and videos about ourselves from the old-fashioned, less public socializing we've done for a long time? Social media researcher danah boyd sums it up in four factors: persistence (it's hard to take down); searchability (people you don't know can find it); replicability (it can be copied and pasted elsewhere, without our knowledge); and invisible audiences (what's most prominent in the above studies) - see this interview with danah in AlterNet.org.

Sex offender registries inaccurate: Study

It makes one wonder how accurate the email part of a federal sex-offender database, required by a new federal law, can be. As they are now, "sex offender registries are often inaccurate and incomplete," the Idaho Statesman reports, citing a recent study by the US Justice Department. "The national sex registry is missing information on 22% of state-level sex offenders, the federal investigators found. Driver's license information, Social Security numbers and basic addresses are regularly absent," the DOJ's Office found. The FBI maintains the national sex offender registry. "As sex registry information becomes more widely accessible via the Internet, investigators sound alarms about the databases used to monitor the nation's 644,000 registered sex offenders," according to the Statesman. "The concerns coincide with more fundamental questions about whether the stigmatizing registries go too far." The new federal law requiring that sex offenders provide their email addresses in addition to other contact data was signed last October (see this Wired blog).

Rate all English-language sites?

Believe me, it's been thought of. But the idea of rating Web sites the way movies and videogames are rated is being revisited by the British government. British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said his government "plans to negotiate with the US on drawing up international rules for English-language Web sites," the BBC reports. It adds that Britain's NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), which has already called on "computer manufacturers and retailers to install security to stop children finding violent or sexual content," said it welcomes Mr. Burnham's suggestions but acknowledges that it would be hard to enforce them. Here's Reuters's coverage.

Filtering improved

The European Commission funded a just-completed three-year study of parental-control tools, and the results are now available. With the help of 140 testers (parents and teachers), the researchers studied 26 tools, from filtering to computer security, server- and family-computer-based. They looked at the tools' appropriateness for three age groups: 6-10, 11-14, and 15-16 (here are the testing criteria). On the accuracy of filtering technology, they report: "While we observed significant improvements in the filtering of pornographic content between 2006 and 2007, we stated last year that non-pornographic but harmful content needed more accurate filtering techniques. We can report significant improvements in this area too, and we observed individual improvements for three filters that participated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. In general, we observe a very positive trend in filter accuracy." Seven of the filtering products received a less-effective score this past year over 2007, however. "Our tests revealed that these filters do detect more potentially harmful content, but at the expense of unduly overblocking harmless content." Here, too, from the Safer Internet program are basic online-safety guidelines in 9 languages. Thanks to QuickLinks for pointing out this info.

BTW, in case you wonder how kids do find workarounds for filters at home, school, etc. (besides going to the library, friends' houses, etc.), here's just one example on the Web: "How to Get Around Blocked Web Sites at School or Work: A Newbie's Guide."

Oz filtering update

The protests are getting louder and their base is broadening, but so far the Australian government's nationwide filter plan is going forward. "Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government - mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism," Yahoo News reports. Dubbed by critics as "the "Great Aussie Firewall," the Internet service provider-based filtering "promises to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.... It would be "less severe than controls in Egypt and Iran, where bloggers have been imprisoned; in North Korea, where there is virtually no Internet access; or in China, which has a pervasive filtering system.... Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom have filters, but they are voluntary." The filtering is scheduled to be tested through next June and has yet to be approved by Parliament. One of the world's largest children's nonprofit organizations, Save the Children, questioned the allocation of funds earlier this month (see my item on this), but proponents question those who "believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online," Yahoo reports. Part of people's concern, reports indicate, is about using a technology that's both flawed and significantly slows down connection speeds. "A laboratory test of six filters for the Australian Communications Media Authority found they missed 3-12% of material they should have barred and wrongly blocked access to 1-8% of Web sites. The most accurate filters slowed browsing speeds up to 86%."