President Bush just signed two bills into law. The first one is useful for tracking sex offenders already convicted and registered, the second seems to be more about finding predators to be arrested and prosecuted. The "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008" ("KIDS Act" for short) requires registered sex offenders to register online identifiers - email addresses, screennames, … [Read more...] about US’s 2 new anti-predator laws
predators
Google Street View fear campaign
This campaign falls into the large "Predators" category of national anxiety. I'm referring to StopInternetPredators.org's campaign against Street View, the new photographic part of Google Maps. The organization is calling it "an entirely new threat to our families and children." We feel strongly that parents' fears about kid safety need to be reduced and understanding increased, so I'm pointing … [Read more...] about Google Street View fear campaign
Public humiliation or Net-safety ed?
It appears that student online-safety education took a harsher tone in Windsor, Colo., recently. The principal of Windsor High School apologized that "some of the ways" John Gay, a Cheyenne, Wyo., police officer, approached his presentation about Internet dangers "offended, embarrassed and are hurting some of our kids," Windsor Now reports. Two accounts of what happened in an all-school assembly - … [Read more...] about Public humiliation or Net-safety ed?
The latest technopanic
No comparative study has been done, but - having recently traveled around the world for 10 months and talked with people involved with children's online safety in a number of countries - I can tell you more than impressionistically that no country has experienced an extended technopanic about predators on the social Web quite the way the US has. The facts about online predation have been … [Read more...] about The latest technopanic
Teen Second Life too safe?
I had to add this little addendum to that last item about social-networking options because you don't see comments like this in the news too often. Liz Lawley, mother of a 14-year-old and director of the social-computing lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told PC World she's "strongly against some of the restrictive methods used online to segregate adults from children in an attempt to … [Read more...] about Teen Second Life too safe?