The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was
established in 1998 and is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. It requires
websites to obtain parental permission before collecting any personal
information from children under the age of 13. This is supposed to better
protect the privacy of children and better ensure their safety from online
predators. However, is it effectively doing that? A new study conducted by the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University suggests otherwise.
The
study claims that when online social networks restrict usage by children under
the age of 13, some children are simply motivated to lie about their ages when
registering for the sites. When children lie about their ages when registering
for such sites, it not only puts their privacy at risk, but the privacy and
protection of children who do not lie about their ages, as well.
The
research team mined data from Facebook using what they referred to as “modest
online crawling, computational resources, and simple data-mining practices.” In
doing so, they were able to build extensive profiles on most minors at three
targeted high schools in the United States. The profiles included such personal
information such as full names, locations of hometowns and high schools,
grade-levels, and profile pictures.
The research team suggests that
such personal information could be sold to data brokers, and it could be used
in phishing attacks. Worse yet, this could facilitate physical dangers to
children from stalkers, predators, and potential kidnappers.
More telling still is the fact
that the research study included an analysis of privacy leakage both with and
without the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. They determined that
attackers can actually gain more information about minors with the law in
place. They suggest that social media sites could better protect the privacy
and safety of children by disabling the reverse look-up of friends feature that
allows anyone to find a child’s hidden information through a friend’s page. It
is vital that parents and children be cognizant of the fact that that the
actions of a virtual friend could compromise a child’s privacy and his safety.
Until online social networks do
so, parents should be diligent in monitoring their children’s Internet use by
checking periodically to see what sites they are using. This can be more
readily accomplished if children’s computers are in a central location in the
home where parents can more readily oversee what their children are doing on
the computer.
Additional strategies to protect
children from predators, both in the virtual world and the real world, can be
found in my award-winning book, What
Would You Do? A Kid’s Guide to Staying Safe in a World of Strangers. The
book is available in hardback cover through, Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Books-A-Million, and through Follett, Baker & Taylor, and Ingram’s
catalogues.
Picture credit: Nevit Dilmen
