News for the Week of June 25, 2006
Children’s online safety was very much on politicians’ minds this past week, both on Capitol Hill and at an all-day conference held in Washington on June 22 by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC): A Dialogue on Social-Networking Sites. Speakers included prominent pediatricians, researchers, children’s advocates, states attorneys general, and executives from the top social-networking sites.
The NCMEC conference
The conference aired many perspectives on the impact of young people and Web 2.0 on each other. We know from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that youth are driving this new, user-produced phase of the Web: “Fully 51% of ‘under 30’ home broadband users have posted content to the Internet, compared with 36% of home high-speed users older than 30,” Pew reported in its May 2006 survey (link to PDF). For youth, we heard at the conference, the online experience is not any single medium - communications or entertainment or research. It’s many media blended - not social networking so much as creative networking or social producing or collective self-expression. The producing/communicating is done on Web pages or profiles with many media: music, photos, video, and text posted by the page producer as well as friends. We also heard that this Web is not easy to control or regulate (by parents or lawmakers) because - as with P2P file-sharing - rules and controls only really reach obedient children and responsible companies; those averse to control find work-arounds. One technology company specializing in identity verification stated that verification tech works when there is personal information (such as drivers licenses and financial data) available to check ID claims against - for children there is no such data available at a national level. At the end of the day we heard from politicians saying that if social-networking businesses didn’t move faster with safety measures, they would be regulated. So the dialogue continues - watch this space (or weigh in yourself at the nonprofit forum about all this, BlogSafety.com).
New Net-safety laws mulled
Lawmakers are vowing to take legislative action against child exploitation online, CNET reported a few days later. “At a hearing Tuesday, 6/27, before the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, politicians served up a dizzying slew of suggestions about what kind of new federal laws should be enacted. The ideas were all over the map,” but new anti-child-porn legislation seems to be top-priority, CNET adds. The article describes some of the other ideas lawmakers are talking about: e.g., outlawing some hotlinks; monitoring what Americans are doing online; a child-porn database and associated ISP filtering, as in the UK; ISP records of who’s assigned what IP address; “search and destroy” bots on P2P networks; restricting Webcam use; regulating search-engine advertising; and a government definition of child pornography.
For their part, Internet service providers “told Congress on Tuesday they're doing all they can to combat online child pornography, but they were told to expect legislation,” the Washington Post reports. Consumer privacy came up in the discussion. Several representatives of Internet service companies “voiced skepticism about creating new laws that would force them to retain data about their users' online activity,” the Post added.
In Other News...
- ISPs help in child porn fight. Five of the US’s biggest Internet companies have announced they will help the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) build a database of child porn images as a tool in the fight against child pornography. AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, EarthLink, and United Online (which runs NetZero and Juno) have formed a coalition and together pledged $1 million to develop the database “and other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images,” the Associated Press reports. The database is expected to be in place by year’s end, and the ISPs will probably scan images associated with IMs and emails sent by their users against the database and report offending ones to the NCMEC, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. Here’s the New York Times’s coverage.
- Cut ‘n’ paste plagiarism. In-class oral exams and essay writing are replacing term papers as a way of assessing student knowledge, the Los Angeles Times reports. Why? I’m sure you guessed: the Internet makes it so easy for students to plagiarize or purchase ready-made papers. Term papers still exist, of course, but “teachers who still assign long papers - 10 pages or more with footnotes and bibliographies - often require students to attach companion essays that describe every step of their research and writing.” Even so, teachers still do their own Web research for “borrowed” phrases and use plagiarism-detection software to dig them up. Such software indicates that “about 30% of papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part,” according to the L.A. Times, which adds that one such program, Turn It In, “evaluates 60,000 submissions a day.”
- Pentagon to peruse social networks. London-based New Scientist magazine reported that it “has discovered that the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”. By monitoring the social networks, NSA, New Scientist says, can connect people and groups better than with mere phone logs. “Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or ‘degrees’ separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.”
- Yearbooks or MyYearbook.com? MyYearbook.com, the social-networking site started by teenage siblings on their spring break, is in comScore Media Metrix’s Top 6 SN sites but has only just started making money. “Jostens, which sells yearbooks, class rings and other scholastic memorabilia...reported $348.5 million in yearbook sales in 2005,” the Associated Press reports. By comparison, MyYearbook.com just started bringing in money - about $40,000 a month with strategically placed banner ads on its site.” But the AP cites one high school student who prefers the free online “yearbook” and plans to get all his friends to establish accounts on the site. He wants a “living” yearbook that friends can use to stay up-to-date on each other’s lives rather than something one puts on a shelf and never looks at again. Most of the site’s users are high school students, but about 30% are in college, the AP reports, unlike Facebook, the vast majority of whose users are at colleges and universities.
