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How much privacy does your kid give up in 1 hour?

Posted on June 10, 2011 by | Comments Off on How much privacy does your kid give up in 1 hour?

This fabulous article from Common Sense Media (one of my favourite non-profit sites for frank reviews of movies, TV shows, books and music for kids and teens) tracks one woman’s efforts to figure out what information is given away when her 12-year-old daughter plays and does homework online.

Christina Tynan-Wood writes about her decision to allow her pre-teen to have an account on Facebook, despite that site’s policy of only allowing those 13 and over to legally open an account. She isn’t alone – it’s an issue I’ve struggled with as well. Like Tynan-Wood, I felt that saying no to Facebook had a social impact for my twin daughters. And as I discuss in this article, allowing them on the social media website with strict rules and supervision meant I could help them make sense of it while they were young enough to still listen to their mom.  According to Consumer Reports, 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13.

One practical impact of the parental decision to allow our kids on Facebook is the massive amount of information these (and other) sites are able to collect about their activities online.

It’s the social networking sites, though, that give me the most pause. It might not seem like a big deal: She installs a silly app, plays a game, “LOLs” on photos, posts a picture, announces what she’s doing, creates a fake job, and “marries” her classroom crush. She’s having a blast.

But the apps aren’t really free. She often “pays” for them by allowing access to her — and sometimes her friends’ — profiles. Add this to the information that she and her friends willingly provide, even the fact that they’re friends, and collect it all into a dossier, and you’d have quite a portrait of my little girl and her crew. The companies that collect this data claim that they never connect this information to individuals, and Facebook prohibits app makers from transmitting data to outside companies — but large breaches have happened.

And what happens when my baby isn’t a baby anymore? Will “the machine” have created a detailed analysis by then of what sort of employee, insurance risk, or student she’ll be? Will it understand that she was playing around when she claimed to work at IHOP? Will it know that the girls didn’t understand what it meant when they called each other prostitutes? Will it strip these games of context, feed it to a database as fact, and sell it to credit companies, insurance agencies, employers, colleges, marketing firms, or the highest bidder? That sounds paranoid. But there have been so many mistakes, break-ins, breaches, and accidents in the world of data collection that the CEO of Sony recently announced publicly that he can’t guarantee the security of Sony’s video game network or any other Web system in the “bad new world” of cybercrime.

These are really important questions. We tend to be kind of laid-back about it because we can’t really see it happening on the surface, but the sheer amount of information collected about our kids is staggering. How will this affect them when they are 25? 40? The answer is we don’t really know. But clearly crossing our fingers and hoping for the best isn’t the best reaction.

The first response is awareness, among both parents and their kids. The second is education. How can we fine tune our security settings and firewalls? What kinds of information should never be given out online? How can we stay on top of the information about us and our children that is out there on the web? These are important questions to have with your kids from the time they are old enough to open their first Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters account. These are some of the questions I’ll be looking at in depth in future posts, and I welcome any comments or suggestions from readers.

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Teaching our kids to be safe, responsible tech users

Posted on June 9, 2011 by | Comments Off on Teaching our kids to be safe, responsible tech users

We’ve all heard stories, true or not, about how kids and teens have misused the Internet and gotten themselves or other into trouble. They run the gamut from mundane stolen Webkins passwords to blood-curdling cyberbullying; the worse stories end up with someone dead or injured. Of course, the stories don’t all end up in People Magazine or on 20/20; everyone knows someone who’s kid or friend had their feelings bruised or worse from an online interaction.

It adds up quickly. And unlike the social pain of the schoolyard, these taunts are written in ink online. They follow kids over years, to new schools and new towns. They can become a part of their digital footprint, notoriously difficult to edit.

It’s an issue a lot of educators and parents are trying to deal with. One of these is the wonderful team that makes up the Partners in Prevention initiative at the Lester B. Pearson School Board, which met on Tuesday to discuss next year’s risk awareness initiative. I’m always happy to see my colleagues in this group, but this was a particularly interesting idea, as we were being offered a rundown of the board’s pioneering Digital Citizenship Program (DCP).

The DCP is all about meeting technology head-on, teaching kids how to become safe, responsible users, producers and consumers of material online. While most school boards tend to ban most non-educational Internet usage, or seem to covering their ears and eyes and hoping it will go away, Lester B. Pearson is forging new ways of teaching kids (and teachers and parents and school staff) how to use it properly.

Because it isn’t going away any time soon. And rather than ignorantly hoping (praying) that this generation will somehow figure out on their own how to be responsible in their usage, they figured it was best to guide, supervise and model emerging best practices. That, gentle readers, is quite simply cutting edge educational policy. I kind of wish it wasn’t happening so late in the game, but better late than never.

While we may not yet be certain of the precise points of getting teens to use Facebook respectfully, we can fall back on some of the established principles of what we do know we need to teach our kids. The nine elements of the DCP come from Ribble and Bailey’s 2007 book Digital Citizenship in Schools. While you can read the extended description of these in the above link, I think it’s worth outlining them here.

  1. Digital access – full electronic participation in society.
  2. Digital commerce – buying and selling of goods and services online.
  3. Digital communication – electronic exchange of information.
  4. Digital literacy – having the capacity to use electronic communication and knowing how and when to use it.
  5. Digital etiquette – standards of conduct expected by other users.
  6. Digital law – legal rights and restrictions governing technology use.
  7. Digital rights and responsibilities – the privileges and freedoms extended to all users, and the conduct expected of them.
  8. Digital health and wellness – elements of physical and psychological well-being related to technology use.
  9. Digital security – the precautions that all users must take to guarantee their personal safety and the security of their network.

Interested in your thoughts and stories – how do we go about teaching these?

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Two 12-year-olds + two iPad2s = infinite distractions

Posted on June 2, 2011 by | 2 comments

all I see of them these days

My older girls, twins about to turn 12, were lucky enough to get brand new, freshly minted iPad2s from their great-aunt and uncle on the occasion of their bat mitzvah. It’s pretty safe to say that the arrival of these gadgets this past weekend was one of the high points of their young lives. They barely slept the night before, spoke about them incessantly, researched apps, games and features.

My husband and I figured they were ready for this leap of independence, since they are pretty good, easygoing kids with strong grades and are voracious readers. Plus, the high school they will be starting in September highly recommends each kid have their own iPad2s for homework assignments and the like. Coupled with a bluetooth keyboard, it’s a relatively affordable starter laptop.

The first day they had them, we gave in to their excitement and let them spend hours setting them up and playing them. They added Facebook, Angry Birds and loads of other entertainment-related stuff, but they also used an iTunes gift card from a friend to add GarageBand, and have spent lots of time composing songs, which is kind of cool.

We normally impose a 30-minute time limit on non-productive screen time, which includes playing games, chatting on Facebook or playing with the DSi or Wii. If they are doing something creative (say, working on a novel or creating animation) or homework, that isn’t generally limited. (Unless it’s a gorgeous day outside and they are still in their pyjamas staring at a screen at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, in which case we flip out and order them to log out or unplug and get their butts outside.) But last weekend, we figured we’d let them get their initial excitement about the iPads out of their systems so we could resume our normal lives.

Yup. We are that naive, even after all these years of parenting.

It’s safe to say that adding these tablet computers into our family lives has added more complications than it has solved problems. I thought that the girls would argue less, since there were no longer three of them jostling for one computer. Nope. Now their almost 8-year-old sister engages in endless, fruitless negotiation for a few golden minutes with one of her sisters’ new toys. Last night I’m pretty sure I heard her promise to give them every dessert she was ever going to get again for the rest of her life.

And they said no.

Controlling access to their screen time has also become considerably more difficult. They are small and portable and hard to supervise. I used to require Facebook to happen on my laptop in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on the screen and maintain a running conversation. Now they end up in their rooms surfing their friends’ homepages two hours after I thought they’d gone to sleep. The 30-minute limit has been stretched way past the breaking point. The amount of reading, or hanging out with other family members, or walking the dog has plummeted.

Now I kind of anticipated this. And I knew new ground rules would be needed. I just wasn’t sure what they’d be.

In our house, freedom is a privilege you earn by demonstrating responsibility and respect. That basic ground rule means that they know they can earn a gradual relaxation of our rules if they consistently show good judgment.

Here are some of the ones I’ve come up with so far:

-iPads stored outside their bedrooms after bedtime;

-surfing online happens in common areas;

-all iTunes purchases must be cleared by me, even if they are covering the cost with a gift card;

-30-minute limit re-imposed, meaning they need to be pleasantly accountable to me when I inquire what they are up to (no visible eye-rolling, no snarky answers, no whining, pleading or shouting);

-fighting with anyone on anything iPad-related means an automatic, temporary suspension of access.

I’ll let you know how this goes, but I’d welcome any suggestions of rules you’ve set for your kids when it comes to computers, iPods, mobile phones, Wii’s, etc, and how those are working out.

 

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