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Parental Control Software Datamines Kids' Online Conversations
An AP report reveals that web-monitoring software from Sentry and FamilySafe, both developed by EchoMetrix Inc., is harvesting data from kids' online chats, trying to determine their opinions on games, movies, and music. The data is then sold to other companies for advertising purposes.
"In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. ... Parents who don't want the company to share their child's information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company's Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday."
The problem isn't the kids, the problem is that some (probably uncomfortably large) percentage of parents absolutely refuse to consider their children as anything other than half employee and half property. You raise your kids to never know privacy, dignity, or respect and unless they are particularly unique in some way that shakes them free of the pattern they'll be doormats to anyone that wants to violate them in a similar way.
It doesn't help that we're the country that has no problem with flooding our kids with violence but god help us if they might possibly see a nipple somewhere, let alone anything else, and so parents will fall over themselves to pay various companies god knows how much for every knee-jerk reaction they can wring out of them.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The child didn't agree to the EULA.