A Trail of Clicks, Culminating In Conflict

NotSanguine writes "Technology companies are up in arms about the FTC's pending rules change which would require explicit parental permission to allow websites to gather a wide range of data on children 13 and under. From the NYT Article: '"If adopted, the effect of these new rules would be to slow the deployment of applications that provide tremendous benefits to children, and to slow the economic growth and job creation generated by the app economy," Catherine A. Novelli, vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, wrote in comments to the agency (PDF).' But would that be a bad thing? As reported in the Times last week, Matt Richtel writes, 'There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.' So, will the new FTC rules end up helping children (by enhancing their privacy and, if industry pundits are right, reducing the amount of content available online for children — thus enhancing their attention spans), or will the negative effects on corporations have as deleterious an effect on the economy as to measurably reduce the quality of education?"

Comments

"JOB CREATION, GENERATED BY THE APP ECONOMY"

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Now I KNOW the objection is spurious.

My children are not to be profited on

[Jailbrekr]

Damn rights you need my explicit permission to gather data on my children, and if you object to this, then you are not only the problem you are a parasite who is in need of extermination.

Stay away from my children you greedy soul-less fucks.

Re:My children are not to be profited on

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stop at the children? I think EVERYBODY ought to have this right. At least if it's enforced for children we can all sign up as 8-year-olds, and experience a little privacy on the net for a change.

Re:My children are not to be profited on

[VortexCortex]

Stay away from my children you greedy soul-less fucks.

Your child needs to stop clicking the "yes I am over 13" button on my game's web forums... You know, because unless we do some SERIOUS fucking data gathering by some "trusted" 3rd party, I won't be able to tell if your kid is lying or not.

If you ever actually hear what your kids say when you're not around, then you'd be calling them the soul-less fucks.

Re:My children are not to be profited on

[LordLucless]

Fine. Just don't start bitching when your children are excluded from the internet.

Seriously, you expect every website to add the infrastructure for handling and verifying written permission before they record your child's IP address? Yeah right. They'll add a little tickbox to their signup page, requiring the user to confirm they're over the age of 13 before they can use the service. And if your children lie and do it anyway, hell, the way the US is going, that'll probably be a federal hacking offence and they'll get carted off to juvie for a spell.

Sounds like a good deal to me

[willoughby]

If we can raise children who are better, more agile thinkers & at the same time put a dent in the corporate America machine I say, "Go for it".

The same 'every classroom needs IPads' teachers?

[thesupraman]

I wonder if these are the same teachers that insist kids need laptops, or even better ipads
(and of course a generous number of those to be given to the teachers, their friends, etc)
to that they can 'teach them'..

I would agree technology is an issue, especially for younger children - the teachers in general
are not exactly fighting against it in general. All our local schools now REQUIRE laptops
for children who are quite honestly too young for them, and one is now REQUIRING ipads
unless a child has 'special dispensation', what a load of BS.

There are still some great teachers, they are just a rapidly dwindling minority, being replaced
by the hoards who just want their job to be made easier and easier, while having more and more
say in the social/moral/health/etc areas of the kids upbringings.

I know its a rant, but a very true one - parents these days are pretty much assumed to not have
their own kids best interests in mind, meanwhile the average abilities of kids leaving (especially
younger levels of..) schools is dropping, what a surprise.

IMHO being a responsible parent has gained a new requirement - fighting the BS educator and
political attacks on parents and children, to keep at least a hint of freedom of thought for the next
generation. Its a sad day.

Widespread belief

[Hatta]

Sure, there's a widespread belief, but is there data? Show me data that exposure to technology is negatively correlated with attention spans, then it might be worth doing something about it. Until then, it's just speculation.

Many things that are widely believed are not true. It's widely believed that the streets are more dangerous today than when we were kids. But crime rates are at a 30 year low, and juvenile crime is at all time lows. Widespread belief is NEVER justification to do ANYTHING except collect data.

Re:Widespread belief

[stanlyb]

You mean, like nowadays dates, when HE, and SHE, are sitting together, on the same table, drinking coffee, and....chatting, using their iPhones? or updating their Facebook status? You don't consider this as a data?

Re:Widespread belief

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Show me data that exposure to technology is negatively correlated with attention spans, then it might be worth doing something about it.

I fully agree, and furthermore - woo xiaorishu has put something new on youtube gtg

Re:In other words

[Obfuscant]

Stop trying to ban things and learn to work with what kids have natural interests in.

It has nothing to do with the message ("what kids have a natural interest in"), but with the medium.

In Too Big To Know the point is made that the online medium is creating a generation that has a shorter attention span and cannot deal with more traditional means of education (like reading paper books.) It's the natural result of working in an instant gratification environment.

It's not a case of banning anything, it's a case of teachers who have thirty little people in their care trying to be able to teach all thirty of them the things that those little people ought to know, like how to make change. Thirty people with thirty second attention spans would be impossible to manage in any organized way. Just as you get Billy paying attention, Suzie's mind has wandered off to something else.

Re:In other words

[SuperKendall]

I am not wholly convinced computers create shorter attention spans.

Consider how locked on to modern mobile computing devices kids are. They sure do not SEEM like people with short attention spans when they are using a tablet. They just find other things less interesting than what they are focused on.

That is why it's important to figure out how to take advantage of this natural interest in educating kids. We have already found a way to extend attention spans they enjoy; make use of that.

I fully agree with the FTC

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be absolutely illegal to collect ***ANY*** information on anyone without direct, express opt-in. Period. Full stop. I don't care if this ruins ad revenue. There is no guranteed right to a profit, only the right to pursue it. I for one, would like to see more of a craigslist-style WWW with little to no corporate presence save having to physically choose to go to a website. Corporations want to have ads, they should pay dearly for the right to show them.

I truly miss the simpler Internet of the late 90s. I don't get why everyone thinks they have to monetize everything. Really?

In order to have a nice Internet experience, because I already pay to access the Internet:

- I block all ads. Nothing escapes the several methods I use to maintain a clean Internet.
- I disallow all cookies.
- I disallow scripts except a couple of sites.
- I refuse to pass on HTTP/S referer, even though this means sites cannot accurately tell who is using them and from where. Disabling referer also has the side effect of killing ad revenue click through, but using a site doesn't mean that I agree to accept the ads or the tracking. When sites stop the ads and tracking, I will stop the blocking. Tit for tat. Fair is fair. You want to track me? Pay for the right to do so. I'll license my computer out for $1000 per year per company that engages in that type of behavior.

limited possabilities

[sjames]

Since the additional programming to accommodate the requirements would add jobs, that must not be it.

So it means that they don't want to provide content for children at all unless they are allowed to exploit them in ways they feel sure the parents won't approve of.

That sounds a bit creepy, really.

Not another "think of the children!" attempt!

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: What should we always say when a politician attempts to pass a new law and says the magic words: "for the children"?
A: "Hell NO!"
This new wonderful panacea law designed to make children happy and healthy will have an effect of the rest of us. Now every website will by law be required to collect your date of birth. You will probably be forced to answer truthfully under penalty of perjury and go to jail. This information will be stored on the companies database that will be shared with all sorts of marketing agencies, and the occasional hackers.
Children will, of course, be able answer whatever they want since they are too young to be charged.

Is this really a system you want? It's what you're going to get.

PUA HTML could be great to childrens apps

[FredAndrews]

A significant motivation for starting the W3C Private User Agent community group was the experience of watching children using online apps with the understand of all the covert monitoring and tracking going on. I believe that a lot could be done to better secure the privacy of the web browser and to better support a more private platform for children, and others. Most of the apps for very young children really do not need to be connected to the web, the apps just need to be downloaded, and could then be run in a sandbox.

Re:In other words

[NotSanguine]

Let set up long term(multi-year) education goals for kids? if they are accomplished at 13, great, 18? great. IN either case they graduate. Teenagers are running corporation, so I'm not exactly worried about the generation. I'm worried that we want to stick to useless ways of teaching just for the sake of tradition. Lets not stuff traditional* ways down their throats because 'change is hard'.

Personally, I'm less concerned about the 13-18 yo demographic and more concerned about the 5-11 yo one. As is the FTC, since the rules change applies only to children under 13.

Many preteens/teenagers know when they're being marketed to and have the sophistication to deal with it appropriately. Younger children need to be monitored by their parents as they likely don't have the sophistication to understand what marketers are trying to accomplish.

I certainly don't want advertisers to create and maintain dossiers (with or without names) on my children (or on me, for that matter -- however, I understand the game and can take precautions for myself. I should be able to do the same for my kids). It's unfair to the child and it allows marketers an unprecedented level of intimacy with my childrens' habits and interests.

in case you hadn't noticed, our corporate overlords^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H benevolent businesses do *not* have our best interests at heart. They just want more and more money. That's what corporations do. I'm not downing capitalism or the value of using market forces.

However it's clear that they need to be restrained to keep them from further intruding on our personal lives.

We don't want the government to do this kind of thing. What makes it okay for corporations to do so on a much wider scale?

There are many of them

[aepervius]

You can probably find them if you have access to various journals. Those are not priamry source but report in general press. If you don't take the time to look it up yourself, I don#t see why I should. Example :

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44460161/ns/health-childrens_health/t/pants-wearing-sponge-blamed-kids-poor-attention-spans/
"The study, published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics, found watching a snippet of a SpongeBob cartoon negatively affected 4-year-oldsâ(TM) attention spans. Watching a more realistic PBS cartoon did not."

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/05/games.attention/index.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/05/games.attention/index.html


Most study don't show a causation, they are only good enough to show a correlation. But since you asked about correlation it is good enough.