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Dear Subscribers:

Can it be that April is over?! :-) Here's our lineup for this first week of May:



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The 'Lunchables' phase

There probably isn't a better metaphor for parents, at least not North American ones. When we asked Shelley Pasnik about parents' options in these early days of kids' online privacy, those slick, snack-y boxed "lunches" by Kraft Foods are what popped into her mind.

"Some of these solutions are Lunchables," she told us. She's not necessarily saying they're bad for children or parents, she assured us. She's referring more to the approach solution-providers - from the government to children's advocates to Internet companies - are taking right now, just after COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) went into effect, April 21. Not surprisingly, the focus is more on quick, convenient consumption than on an overall nutrition plan for feeding that growing child.

Shelley's the one to ask about this. When it comes to children and technology, overall nutrition is her bread and butter (a pun, but true!). As a senior researcher at the New York-based Center for Children and Technology, she's logged tens of thousands of miles and ten years talking to parents, child and consumer advocates, business leaders, health experts, educators, government officials, and "as often as possible" children, looking closely at children's use of interactive technologies. She was a contributor to a major online-kids study, "Safe & Smart" (see our report) in March and an earlier milestone, "Web of Deception: Threats to Children from Online Marketing".

But let's back up for a minute - to the ever-growing number of options for parents. We asked Shelley what she thinks of them.

"I think the spirit of some of these efforts - trying to arm parents with information - is an important first step," Shelley said, "but I think there are a lot of mixed messages." Go to CME [Center for Media Education] or AOL or GetNetWise, or DMA [the Direct Marketing Association], and most of these begin with some bold statement. For some it's 'The Internet represents vast potential for education...' or 'Children are being preyed upon by marketers…', and they generally characterize children in one way or another…. These statements are very broad, then they immediately get into the details of the law - permission slips, how to facilitate kids' privacy, etc…."

"When you look at one meal at a time, you can understand - a quick fix, they're hungry now!" Shelley said. Instead, she added, solution-providers need to ask, "How are we collectively going to make sure that children are going to acquire the skills to assess and evaluate [this new environment]? I'm not seeing a real conversation around that issue."

So what's a parent to do while the debate gets going?

"It depends on how old the child is," she said. "I don't think there's only one approach. For younger children, it's finding a few places that are going to feed my child - a few areas that engage them, offer challenges, … give information that will lead to self-discovery and acquiring knowledge. I would play and work with them to stay in those environments. As children get older, you want that environment to grow with them. Then you need to work with the child to help her determine where she's going to go, expanding the possibilities for exploration. It is hard, because of time constraints and technology limitations. This is hard. We want to be there when a child has questions about homework. But what do you do when you've forgotten algebra?"

What if the parent isn't comfortable with the Internet yet?

It might help, Shelley told us, to just "go offline and talk to the school media specialist or the local branch librarians - on your own or with your child." We loved her next thought - that it might be great first to "have a conversation with your child. Ask her, 'Where can I go, how do I start? What experiences do you [the child] want to have, what are you looking for, what are your friends doing on the Internet?'

"We want to elevate them so they have experiences that will lead to good growth," Shelley continued. "We also need to be aware of the culture that they occupy." There was something refreshing about this kind of back-to-basics approach, we thought. Maybe kids' privacy doesn't have to be as complicated as it looks at the moment. Maybe we can let this, like so many other aspects of the Internet phenomenon, give us opportunities to communicate with our children.

"Families don't see it as a privacy issue," Shelley said, "they don't have the luxury of separating it out. And I think that's fine." As for the solution-providers, she suggested that "back to basics" is "what I think is missing at some of these Web sites that offer information for parents. What we need to do is integrate the lessons that are in this privacy project and allow families to be in control of their personal information, but in a way that makes sense to somebody who's not in Washington. We're not all speaking the same language."

Sounds like a good research project somebody needs to fund!

Now we'd like to hear from you. If any of you - parents or educators - have arrived at any sort of solution to the problem of protecting your children's privacy, please tell us about it. Because we agree with Shelley that solutions often depend on a child's age, we'd love to hear about little-kid solutions and big-kid solutions. Or tell us what you think of some of the resources we linked you to in our COPPA report, including the FTC's KIDZPrivacy page, which Shelley thinks well of. Thanks! The address, of course, is feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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On privacy for the rest of us

The issue is of increasing concern to everyone - not just kids, not just Internet users. It's thoroughly addressed - and given context - in "The Eroded Self", a book excerpt in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The book, entitled "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America," looks at everything from DoubleClick's info-gathering computer "cookies" to Monica Lewinsky's dismay over the Independent Counsel's subpoena of Washington bookstores for receipts of her book purchases while working at the White House. The piece makes for fascinating reading.

What struck us was Rosen's comforting assurance (hope he's right) that "there is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost." And his conclusion, something Shelley touches on above: "What we need now is the will." The article links to sites selling software for protecting privacy and a fulsome index of Times articles on the subject.

In other privacy news this week:

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A subscriber writes: Kids & the Net in Germany

We think Christina's very questions give insight into what's happening with kids online in her country, and we thought you'd find this email as interesting as we did. If you'd like to help answer her questions, do email us - your experience in your own school is part of the answer!

"Hi, I found you on the Internet and want to say congratulations for your site. It's a brilliant organisation and so important for our children.

"May I ask a question: We don't have such an organisation in Germany. In Germany we are at the beginning of the building of an information superhighway: In the next 12 months all German schools are being connected to the Internet, and teachers and pupils get flat-rate Internet access. But I don't think that we can send our children into the Internet without any help. Can you please tell me what it's like in the USA … when a child at the age of 5 or 6 is entering the Internet on a PC at school is there any software installed on that school PC to save the child from dangerous sites? Is there a special Internet community for kids and one for teens from which they can start to explore the Internet safely? Please give me any information about that issue! Is there a certain start page installed on school PCs for the kids?

"I would really appreciate any information about it because I know its going to be important for my children soon, when they are in touch with the Internet in school. Thanx a lot."

Editor's Note: For Christina and all subscribers, some context in an article at Wired News. It's about a recent panel discussion in Seattle on how kids' online safety is being approached in North America and Europe. The discussion, part of an international conference on Internet regulation at the University of Washington, included mention of a European Commission "network of hotlines where people can report illegal and indecent Web sites or newsgroups" and the view that Germany is the European country with the most developed rules for protecting minors.

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Web News Briefs

  1. More 'Love Bug' trouble

    It's now being called the worst computer worm ever, according to Reuters (via Wired News). Stay on the alert for variants of the virus we reported on yesterday (in a special edition of the newsletter). It's assuming new forms and names. According to Wired News, "love" is now not necessarily in the subject field of the email carrying the virus. A variant has the subject "Mother's Day Order Confirmation." Another has the very common subject "Joke" and an attachment called "Very Funny.vbs". Just be very careful about opening any attachments to emails you receive over the next few weeks.

  2. Kids' picks

    Would you pick these too? They're the favorite 15 sites of children aged 2-11, by Nielsen/NetRating's measure, as reported by ZDNet. At the top of the list is funschool.com, a site that publishes "educational" online games for children in grades pre-K through 6. One of the most interesting features of this site to us is its "Premium Access," allowing subscribers an advertising-free environment in exchange for a subscription fee of $6.95/month or $49.95/year. Great idea! Children's Web site publishers have talked about offering this choice at conferences, but we haven't seen much evidence of it until we went to funschool.com (if you've seen this feature in children's sites you like, would you let us know?). The other Top 5 kid picks, in order of pref, are KidsWB.com from Warner Bros.; FoxKids.com of Fox TV; Nikolai.com, which produces kids shows that air on CBS; and Nickelodeon's Nick.com.

    It's tough to miss the strong presence of TV among those and all the Top 15, as ZDNet columnist Allen Weiner points out on Page 2 of the piece (our profile in March of nine-year-old Alyssa bears this out. Writing to the kids Web publishing industry, Allen also points to a dilemma it faces: "How can you create a Web business that appeals to children and their parents?" Do you like these sites in the Top 15? What would your Top 5 kids' sites be? Please email us!

  3. ICQ deletes preteens

    The move is to keep AOL's ICQ instant-messaging service in compliance with COPPA, the children's online privacy law. According to CNET, that means that any adults posing as kids are also being forced to close their ICQ accounts. Microsoft's Hotmail took similar action. The CNET piece describes some of the measures various companies are taking.

  4. Earthlink's DSL deal

    According to this week's issue of the USIIA Bulletin, Earthlink, the nation's largest independent ISP, has announced a program to waive all setup costs for its DSL services nationwide. The program will save customers an average of $300. Before you dive in, read DSL users' horror stories in the New York Times.

  5. 'Sophisticated' search

    Watch out, Google, AltaVista is after you. According to CNET, with its new "Raging Search", AltaVista is going after the sophisticated searchers to whom Google has appealed. Google prides itself on quick search results that are very relevant to what one's looking for; results are ranked according to sites' popularity. Raging.com aims for similar speed and relevancy, but it looks as if site popularity doesn't figure into the Raging equation as prominently it does in Google's. Let us know what you think!

  6. Influential librarian's concerns

    Librarian, consultant, public speaker, and author Karen Schneider is known to be very pro-Internet and very pro-free speech on the Internet. But even she, reports the New York Times, "sees clouds on the Web horizon." The cloud most interesting to us is a general lack of critical judgment. Schneider, like many librarians and educators, "is worried that young people who are perfectly adept at using technology are often clumsy at something perhaps more important: evaluating the quality of the information the technology feeds them," the Times writes. She doesn't blame teachers or librarians, just the speed with which the Internet has come upon us all. The article goes into what some schools and districts are doing about this problem. We look back fondly on lessons learned from two teachers we interviewed about the Net in the classroom back in '97 - about when Karen's book, "A Practical Guide to Internet Filtering," came out. Don't miss the useful information in Karen's own Web site, including a slide presentation on filtering in libraries. The obvious hard work and practical experience that went into the presentation shed light on libraries' dilemma about filtering.

  7. Cyberstalking update

    This week Wired News ran an update on the growing problem of cyberstalking and how to get help. The article includes advice from experts Parry Aftab, executive director of Cyberangels (a nonprofit online-safety organization with 4,000 volunteers who respond to complaints and give moral support); Jayne Hitchcock, president of Women Halting Online Abuse; and Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes prosecution unit for the Manhattan district attorney.

  8. Tech-certified liberal arts majors?

    If it doesn't already, the new economy might soon demand a little add-on to the BA degree: tech certification! Reports the New York Times, the creators of a four-hour technology skills exam called Tek.Xam like to think of their test as "the technology equivalent of a bar exam for those who majored in, say, English or history." Apparently, some schools agree: So far, 67 colleges and universities in 24 states have offered some version of the test and around 1,700 students have taken it.

    But graduates from Wyoming schools may never need take it. At least not the Internet-literacy part. In another Times report, Wyoming is the first state to wire all its public schools - even the most remote ones. The project was an especially ambitious one for Wyoming because the state is so rural. The story profiles Willow Creek Elementary School in Kaycee, Wy., where third-grader Diamond Forges is the only student!

  9. MP3.com loses

    It was a law suit watched closely by people in both the music and Internet industries. CNET reports that a federal judge's decision that MP3.com had violated copyright laws could be a "crushing blow" for the young Internet company. The winner in the case, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), claimed that "My.MP3.com," which allows users to access and listen to CDs they'd already purchased, violates copyright laws because MP3.com had copied and stored the My.MP3.com database of some 80,000 CDs on its own servers. Here's Wired News's version of the story. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the verdict won't stop music fans: "The music industry may have won a key victory … in court, but it probably can't win online," the Monitor said. And Wired News reported that, ironically, CD sales are up, despite the RIAA's piracy claims. The New York Times reported that MP3.com hopes for a settlement. The RIAA asked for up to $6 billion in damages, "almost half of the more than $14 billion retail value of recordings sold in the United States in 1999," the Times wrote.

    Meanwhile, pressure on Napster, that other thorn in the recording industry's side, builds, as rock band Metallica dramatically dumps the names of hundreds of thousands of Napster users (who downloaded its music) on Napster's doorstep, reports CNET. There's lively discussion all over the Net about Metallica and Napster - a good sampling can be found on Yahoo!'s Music discussion boards (there's some profanity in there).

  10. Microsoft followup

    Various reactions and some useful history were what appeared in the media about Microsoft this past week. MS employees were ho-hum about news of the US government's plan to break up their company, Reuters reports via ZDII.com. Most interesting to us among the New York Times's extensive coverage was Sunday's interesting backgrounder on what went on behind the scenes over the past two years, both among the 17 states involved in the antitrust suit and at the Justice Department - the "tangled path" the various parties encountered. The Times also got the varied reactions of four legal experts and the view from Europe.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News

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