The best way to protect kids online is to educate the parents
By Leslie Poston
Continuing to perpetrate the placebo effect sought by parents in the MySpace “Megan Meier” agreement, the first official task force on “internet safety for kids” has convened. Why do I consider this a useless placebo similar to airline “safety” changes after 9/11? Because the only way for parents to truly protect children online is to do something revolutionary: parent them.
No amount of task forces and monitoring laws will make a child safe online. They might leak into the Internet world and encroach on privacy for the rest of us over time (give the powers that be an inch and they’ll take a mile when it comes to approved monitoring of internet use), but they certainly won’t protect anyone. The only way to protect the children is to know where they go online, how they get there and what they do when they get there. Parents should take the time to learn how to use a computer, keep it in a public place where they can look over a kid’s shoulder while they instant message, learn the abbreviations used in instant messages, set up simple firewalls, antivirus and anti-spyware programs, make sure they have simple barriers in place to control where their kids are going, and have accounts set up wherever their kids do to watch them.
Since all of that would require too much actual effort on the part of many parents (similar to asking them to participate in other aspects of their kids’ lives, like school), we turn to a task force to handle our parenting for us. The issue that started all of this, the Megan Meier incident, could potentially have been avoided if her parents had been paying more attention to who she was talking to online (the next door neighbor, as it turns out).
Taking part in this task force on child safety online (called the Safety Technical Task Force) are AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), Second Life’s Linden Lab, Microsoft, Symantec, Verizon and Yahoo. Running the task force is the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Berkman Executive Director John Palfrey said “The safety concerns posed by the Internet are part and parcel of the safety concerns that arise in human interactions in the physical world. These concerns are not unique to any one service or technology platform; they are shared by the companies that provide Internet services and the individuals who use these services.”
One of the many goals of the task force is said to be new authentication tools that do not rely on things like parental credit cards. Never mind the success other sites have found in involving the parents by requiring credit card verification, even for free sites. Having the parents know where the kids are and verify a way to be contacted if something happens is much too old fashioned and effective. What we really need is a way for the kids to surf the net unfettered by parental units, free to find and befriend whatever social deviant they see fit by the use of parent-free authentication devices.
One of the other tools being considered by the task force is an email registry for parents to monitor and use to keep kids off certain sites. Because it is completely impossible to get a free email address in a hundred different ways online, and the kids certainly wouldn’t dream of doing that to get around the restrictions. Having something like this set up completely ignored the fact that most kids are already better educated about online life than their parents – technology comes second nature to people who have grown up with it.
The task force is a nice bit of fluff aimed at distracting parents from real safety issues. A better approach is for parents to educate themselves on computers and learn to talk to their kids. It only takes a short time to learn a few basic things about online navigation and setting up your home computer in a safe way. It takes even less time to say “Hey, tell me about what you did online today.” than it does for a task force committee to reach any useful conclusions.
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March 5th, 2008
I agree wholeheartedly that informing parents is the best way to protect children!
March 5th, 2008
Why do parents always want things done for them these days? Or if they don’t want their kids on the internet they believe everyone should be subject to a new law/whatever. Just do their own job and educate their children themselves!