Sophos Cloud Optix
Should there be a minimum age before you can use social networks or have a web email account?
Under Google and Facebook’s terms of services, you have to be at least 13 years old. However, plenty of even younger girls and boys are probably using the systems – with or without the knowledge of their parents.
The issue has come to light again for two reasons. Firstly, new research has uncovered that 55% of children under the age of 12 have a Facebook account, despite age restrictions put in place by the site.
According to a study by New York University, 76 per cent of the underage kids registered their social networking accounts with the help of their parents.
In the United States, sites such as Google and Facebook are required to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which demands that children under the age of 13 must provide a parent’s/guardian’s permission before giving out personal information online.
Facebook and Google (and many other websites) aren’t set up to collect permission, and so they waltz around COPPA by insisting that users must be over 13 years old to use their services.
“Insist”? Well, they make clear in their terms of service (which you sign-up to when you join one of these websites) that you are 13 years old or over. And – at that point – the websites normally think that they have performed enough diligence.
Clearly this limitation doesn’t sit too well with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has said in the past that he will “at some point” challenge the law restricting youngsters from participating on his social network.
The issue of pre-teens using the internet has come to the fore again because of the young daughter of Rich Warren, a software engineer from Houston, Texas.
Warren has explained in a Google+ post how he set up a Gmail account for his daughter years ago so she could email her grandparents.
More recently Warren’s daughter Haruko has been using the account for classwork, keeping in touch with schoolmates and homework.
This weekend, however, Google unceremoniously shut down the account, meaning the young girl no longer had access to her work or her address book of contacts – because she was too young.
As Mashable described it, Google made a young girl cry.
All of this talk stirred a memory in me. Do you recall this TV advert by Google, where a father creates a Gmail account for his newly-born daughter?
Sure the commercial pulls on the heartstrings, but isn’t it also a little hypocritical to shut down a Gmail account created for one young girl, and yet have a TV advert like this?
Okay, so maybe the video doesn’t represent precisely the same scenario. Maybe “Hollie” in the video is only supposed to log into her account and read the emails her dad has been sending her since birth once she has turned 13.
But it still feels like rubbing salt into the wound of Rich Warren’s daughter, who has seemingly lost forever emails sent to her by her grandmother.
You can understand Rich Warren being annoyed, and his daughter being upset.
Let’s hope that Google shows a little compassion, and sends the young girl a backup of her data and past communications, the work she has produced on Google’s systems so far, and her list of contacts.
And let those of us who help our pre-teen kids create internet accounts realise that they could be shut down at any moment, and the data lost forever.
Even if websites did try to include children as part of their community, in a safe way that protected them from bad stuff and complied with COPPA, there are significant challenges both in proving that someone is under 13 when they create an account and verifying that a parent giving them permission to share personal information online is who they say they are.
Don’t expect a fix to this problem anytime soon.
https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py…
this can help.
People who allow children under the age of 13 to have a Facebook or Google account are teaching their kids to lie. They are teaching their kids that contracts are useless and they need to pay attention or agree with the terms of the contract. Such kids are being taught to just sign and get what you want without regard to the meaning of the terms.
i think this is easy to solve, create, ‘facebook junior’ for under 18’s that migrates to a full account when the individual turns 18 and authenticates with a credit card.
this way you can police and regulate the pre-teens more thoroughly and keep them off the main adult site!
"easy to solve" may not be so easy. To do this, Facebook (and Google et al) would have to create completely new sites that are COPPA-compliant. The fact that very few companies have done such a thing, period, shows that it's likely not financially viable for them. And they are, after all, in it for the money — not the COPPA lawsuits.
However, it seems to me that "someone" should be able to create something that uses APIs produced by these companies to create a system that has an adult account, along with "children" accounts associated with it, where the adult account grants limited access (time, volume, etc.) to the system, and requires any "friending" activity to be authorized by the other account. This *should* take care of the liability issue, even though in many cases parents who can't be bothered will give their kids the password to the parent account and let them manage it themselves.
There should be a way to create a child account under a parent account. Therefore a child can login and use the service but the parent can view and control everything on the child account from within their own account. Thus preventing something like the child getting up to no good or changing the password without the parent being able to access it.
As a parent I am a firm believer that it is my responsibility to educate my child, protect my child and keep an eye on what he does online to ensure that he is safe. Not to rely on a 3rd party service provider to do the parenting for me.
Granted the company should put reasonable security restraints to protect the individual in general but they cant be expected to do the baby sitting aswel.
Andrew, I don't know if "it's likely not financially viable for them" as much as there hasn't been a business need. Google and FB have given a wink and a nod to COPPA while making it easy for under 13-ers to create their own accounts, with or without their parents' permission.
I would never allow my kids to have a facebook page or anything like it. Hopefully Facebook will be a thing of the past by the time I have to tell them hell no. I have seen no good come of social networking. It doesn’t connect people and it’s dark side gives 24 hour/7 day a week access to young people and their peers. There is no end to the ways in which they can be mean, bully and harass each other. If my children want to network socially, they can make real friends, real plans, and actually interact with other human beings. You know, like in the old days.
There's another solution – limit pc time and monitor the usage of your children. (There isn't 24/7 access UNLESS its permitted). My kids do not have a computer in their rooms). The family computer is …. in the 'family' room, monitored by me. I check the mail, the list and the posts including, but not limited to the newsfeed. Is this time consuming you ask? YES, it absolutely is…but necessary in my opinion. My child has also become much more fluent on a keyboard. Thank you facebook.
Children have email accounts that are screened: go to kidsemail.org
One of the problems I have with this is that all of the kids compatible sites, educational and gaming require email registration.
So my 4 year old has a Forwarding address to my account, so he can log in and use the service under supervision and safety. He also uses G+ to use the video service with GrandParents and Family friends.
There should be no reason why children of any age cant use the internet in perfect safety as long as they are supervised to a certain extent and most importantly educated about it.
In my opinion most adults need educating aswel as the majority of people share far too much personal information where they shouldn't and expose themselves.
(Set your security options, educate your children, supervise them, place computers only in public areas of the house and dont buy laptops etc, dont share any personal information online unless your happy to live with the consequences and DONT ADD STRANGERS AS CONTACTS OR FRIENDS)
you could always manage a childs account yourself, have all emails forwarded you your account as well for example. That way you won't lose emails and you keep an eye on younger users of email.
Another pertinent question never seems to be asked — how old is too old for Facebook?
Why should the adult members of our society share information, like the names and faces of children, their place of residence, their opinions on political, social, and commercial ideas, and other information that was a short time ago, believed to be "personal" with the world at large?
Are we really so naive to believe that we live in a "global village" who's members feel a a communal bonhomie similar to those shared with your neighbors, friends, or even the mailman?
Tools like Facebook are insidious data collection systems designed to capture your needs and desires with the intention of selling you, as a consumer, to the highest bidder.
What do I like? None of your damn business, Facebook.
What do I dislike? Disingenuous "social networking" websites that profess to provide me with a service as my "friend," while possessing a predatory agenda to record my thoughts and feelings and sell my voluntary admissions to those who want to turn me into a consumer.
On Facebook and sites of similar ilk, in the words of Jack Webb, whatever you say can be used against you. At least on Dragnet, a suspect is given a Miranda warning before offering information. Facebook, on the other hand, has offered only lies about the privacy protections offered its users.
There has to be a better way to share photos and stay in touch with friends and family, that does not open our personal lives to marketeers interested solely in exploiting our desires.
ipgrunt:
You wrote:
“There has to be a better way to share photos and stay in touch with friends and family, that does not open our personal lives to marketeers interested solely in exploiting our desires."
There is a better way. It's called "Your Own Website". It's not free, of course, but then as you've pointed out (…well, not explicitly, but your comments boil down to it), Facebook isn’t free either. In fact, the cost of Facebook to EACH of its users is the commoditization of their personal information.
Facebook doesn't "turn you into a consumer". You're already a consumer. What Facebook does is turn you (your information, actually) into a commodity—a product it can sell. It only “makes” you a consumer of other people's information as a means to fulfill its main purpose—namely, to GET the information in the first place.
If you're a Facebook user, presumably it's because you want access to others who are Facebook users. Sure, you're a "consumer" of that information, but Facebook didn't “make” you become a consumer. You WANTED the information. The price of getting it is surrendering your own personal information to Facebook. After it has your information, it uses it to entice others who want access to it to provide THEIR information in exchange for access to your information.
Of course, they think it's a fair exchange, and maybe it is for those who don't care about all the negatives (compromised security, invasion of privacy, potential exposure to malware and identity theft…etc.). But I suspect that most of the millions of Facebook users don't even know about those negatives. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that most of them never even consider such things.
It goes without saying that Facebook has no interest in educating its users about the real cost of having a Facebook account—especially the potentially much higher cost if the very real risks turn into actual hazards. So, here you have a company whose interests run directly counter to the interests of its users, and the company doesn’t want them to know it. What was it that Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook users? Oh, yeah…”dumb f*cks”.
[Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuc…
In a rational and moral world (or, equivalently, in a world where people took responsibility for making informed choices), a company like Facebook couldn't stay in business. Alas, we do not live in that kind of world…yet.
There have been a number of conversation about this brought up recently by Danah Boyd in an "On the Media" interview on the culture of lying that had been developed. Also, this is a high issue for school to deal with when it come to the tools that want to use. I recently wrote the following on how COPPA – http://www.williamstites.net/2011/12/11/dealing-w… – is effecting schools and their attempt to use a number of online tools. As more and more moves to the cloud it becomes more and more difficult.
This is also poking it's head into the application download arena as an AppleID requires a login and someone to conform to the COPPA regulations (http://www.williamstites.net/2011/12/12/the-appleid-in-your-11-program/)
I think that kids under the age of 18 should not have a face book account .