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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?"
Now I KNOW the objection is spurious.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
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.