Geolocation the New Frontier in Kids’ Privacy Questions

The FTC was mainly looking for “explicit content” in virtual worlds, though neither phrase was defined in the congressional authorization, said Phyllis Marcus, senior staff attorney in the Division of Advertising Practices. There’s “no settled definition” of virtual worlds among academics either, she said. Staff decided to look for sexual and violent content in places featuring “real time” communication, analyzing worlds popular with kids under 13, those for older kids, and those meant for adults. Most of the explicit content they found was text-based, which wasn’t surprising, Marcus said, but declined to further detail the study’s results. It will make recommendations for virtual world operators, parents and kids.

The commission is also planning a “wholesale look” at the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) next year, for which the FTC gave no recommended changes following its last review in 2005, Marcus said. The law regulates what information marketers can collect from kids online and what kids can disclose about themselves. “I have no idea” what the commission will end up recommending, but there could be “major or minor tweaks,” she said. The FTC recently reached a $250,000 settlement with a teen-focused clothing marketer for alleged COPPA violations (WID Oct 21 p6).

Facebook’s requirement that all users identify themselves by name on the site has managed to “deter the worst forms of conduct,” Kelly said. The enforcement infrastructure promotes “responsibility” among users. MySpace has collaborated with experts to create its safety policies, said Chief of Security Hemanshu Nigam: “We tried to change the original paradigm of the industry” through proactive efforts to find bad content and conduct, using flags for keywords that then trigger staff review, as well as responding to notice and takedown requests. MySpace creates a hash file from all removed content to block future uploads and is “building a pipeline” to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for more troubling reports, Nigam said. The site has helped return home nearly 400 runaway children in the past year by analyzing their pages and alerting authorities, which it also does when “suicide” shows up on a user page, he said. Because children often reveal personal information to friends on MySpace, the site can also look for clues as to whether they are truthful about their ages, he said.

Disney’s ClubPenguin.com goes much further because it focuses on younger children, said Susan Fox, vice president of government relations. It has “hundreds of human moderators” acting as a “virtual security guard in the building” and three levels of chat. Automatic filtering also detects “the 30-year-old who’s saying they're 11,” she said. It collects parents’ e-mail addresses, as required by COPPA, and notifies them when a child says something questionable, providing the full chat log, creating “a lot of teachable moments,” Fox said.

Child safety doesn’t demand any correct figure of human intervention, Kelly said. “It is inevitably an arms race” in which Facebook must build better technology before threats such as spammers grow large, but humans will always be required to find and learn from threats that get through. “You win more than you lose,” he said. New entrants in social networking must consider early how to protect users technologically, before their user bases swell, or “you're going to get screwed,” Nigam said. “The reality is all of us make money on reputation,” and advertisers won’t do business with a “tainted” brand. General Counsel Reggie Davis of Zynga.com, a two-year-old company that makes games for social networks, said its customer-care team has quadrupled this year to handle safety issues among others. It’s started monitoring in-game activity such as chat, and reports abuse, suspends accounts and reports users to the social-networking hosts of the games, he said.

Group member Sam McQuade, who teaches computer-crime law at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said he wasn’t convinced that social networks were catching as much bad behavior as they claimed, at least “if you're not doing independent evaluations.” Without better algorithms, “it seems like you have a gap here” that more research and development could fix. “You have a good idea because there are constant attempts to circumvent the system,” and Facebook’s network is monitoring for signs of attack and user accounts that are suspiciously “reaching out” to others, Kelly said. Many companies are working on creating an algorithm that’s “as smart as a human being,” Nigam said. But there must be some restraint by social networks to account for false positives, Kelly said: “The worst-case scenario is you dispatch law enforcement” to a location where someone has innocently set off an alert. Asked whether they were intruding on member privacy, Nigam said MySpace is simply analyzing users’ public postings: “There’s no real quote-unquote privacy issue.”

Parental control mechanisms vary, but social networking platform Ning has found that many educators and parents set up private networks on Ning to show kids how to control their online presence, said Chief Policy Officer Jill Nissen. MySpace developed software that parents can download to check on whether their child has an account and even delete their profiles, Nigam said. Facebook gives parents a “client-based technique” for observing use of the network by their kids and provides parents access to those accounts “where appropriate,” Kelly said. The best strategy to protect their kids is to “friend” them on Facebook, he said.

Giving Users ‘Little Notices’ About Location Status

Mobile social-mapping provider Loopt has received considerable help from groups such as the Internet Education Foundation, Progress & Freedom Foundation and Harvard’s Berkman Center in devising privacy features, said Chief Operating Officer Brian Knapp. “I'll say it: Nobody reads privacy notices,” he said. “We know, it’s OK.” Loopt instead provides “little notices along the way” to remind users when they take specific actions such as adding friends or viewing settings, how their data will be used, he said. The service’s mushrooming user base led Loopt to ask Facebook and MySpace for help in responding to abuse reports, Knapp said. The company has worked with domestic-violence groups to reduce the risk of stalking through geolocation. Even in the service’s new LooptMix, which lets users with similar interests identify each other nearby, users can choose to block a person from showing up and in turn being seen by other users, he said.

Knapp criticized “propaganda” in a recent academic study that found most Internet users don’t want to be tracked for any reason online (WID Oct 1 p9). “Far from being dangerous,” the mobile space is “a place where kids will open up and talk about things that are troubling them.” Ask users whether they want to get directions or find their friends through geolocation and their views will be different, Knapp said. “The key here is to let people know … that these devices can locate themselves” and give them options to turn off that feature. Knapp said he has joked with people at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which has faulted many companies’ privacy practices, by asking what they do with his name when he signs into their building. CTIA Vice President Dane Snowden said the wireless group is firmly behind opt-in choices for consumers and is checking with its members on their practices. “It is sometimes annoying” for consumers to reiterate their desires, he said, “but we want that there.”

Group member Larry Magid of ConnectSafely.org said he worries about blocking social networks in schools and libraries, adding that the group should recommend to Congress that the technologies be used for learning in the classroom. Nigam said three in four schools were blocking such applications, as revealed at an education conference he attended, but students in the crowd said “they got around it with no problem” using proxy services. MySpace is trying to educate organizations that “just don’t understand.” Kelly said “the ‘ban’ movement is beginning to disintegrate.”

Magid also asked whether the industry and lawmakers are “encouraging a culture of lying” by keeping age limits too high. Most sites now allow users who say they're over 13. Magid said 10 might be more realistic. Zynga’s Davis said the company is increasingly developing games that appeal to younger children -- who aren’t allowed to join the most popular social networks. It will be a challenge to reach that group with its current business, he said. Knapp said geolocation isn’t a threat to younger children. “They're texting each other hundreds of times a month,” and research has “scientifically shown” that kids typically use mobile communications at home, a friend’s house or school. MySpace recently changed its minimum age to 13 from 14, because it learned that some 13-year-olds are already in high school, Nigam said. Kelly made group members laugh and joke that he was already sounding political by saying, “We're going to comply with the law, and the law’s 13.”