It's a bit mean this, because what I'd actually like to do is have some sort of debate. Instead because my comments are screwed, it'll all come out slightly on e sided.
A good mate, whose argument stype can be somewhat er... frustrating, has a big bone of contention with me re: "Privacy". His point - privacy is dead. My point - what an absolute load of cobblers.
In the first instance, this story from Wired ("Teens reveal too much online") certainly backs up his points, in terms of - teens simply use online interfaces without having the privacy worries that some of us, as adults a) have ourselves and b) have on their behalves.
But of course what they are actually saying is (as adults doing the worried thing), there have been assaults and problems, particularly associated with the use of Myspace (as part of this investigation. It could just as easily be chat, or Messenger or god knows what else).
The problem I feel personally is that providers of any services like this have a duty of care to limit personal information of specific sorts being shown / touted by kids, either about themselves or about each other. Although Nora's obviously 2 and thus a tad young to be counted in this thing generationally (yet!) what I do see in her, and in older kids too - the kind taking their first steps out in to the interweb world is a simple, trusting innocence based on nothing bad ever having happened. Life is nice and wonderful, everyone I meet is lovely. This is as worrying (but natural) for a parent in the offline world as it should be in the online one.
The fact is that this is a problematic way to live on the internet for kids in innumerable ways. Two points to raise here and one based on what I felt at the time was a subjective case study used in the privacy debate which made no sense: the short of it being - "My teenage friend who is now 17, has been out as gay at school all her life. Things aren't the same any more, privacy is just not an issue".
Well. To bring in another subjective case, I would like to raise that of a teenage boy from a West London family who are strongly religious in the Islamic faith, who made the mistake of telling his parents he was gay. Apparently, he'd told only 1 friend prior to that. His parents have gone completely nuts, and have sent him to a country strongly associated with Islam, where he has relatives for a number of years to get some "therapy". His big friend, luckily, is known to McK, so he is going to relay the message that the kid can go and talk to the British Embassy as soon as he is 16, and be repatriated, without his parents having to know. The kid may not have clocked this as an option. All very horrible, gutwrenching and awful. I've not mentioned any names and kept it vague for obvious reasons.
The point in the story above is that for a certain percentage of the population ie: relatively liberal in attitude, etc, there are aspects of one's early teenage 'acceptance of the self' etc which may now be very different to the 'being beaten up constantly, spat on or sent to Coventry by the entire school population' that would have happened in the past (although, given the amount of school age teenage suicides there are, I sometimes wonder if those days are gone). There is *always* a need for privacy, to protect the interests of kids who do not have the necessary life wisdom to take on that issue themselves. It is a complete nonsense to assume that all kids (indeed, any kids) are in the position where social support and confidence is there in spades, to support them being open about ANY issue that they believe would make them appear "different" to everyone else. And that's above and beyond the privacy re: personal information point.
The thing with the interweb is - curiously, I was having this discussion with a friend just the other day. He was saying that whereas at university, he felt awkward and socially stumbling, when the interweb came along, he suddenly discovered that without the horrors of having to deal with face-to-face communication, 1-1 and 1-many became something easy, and fluid. It's an age old "known" which has probably affected us all to some degree or other.
Consequently, in the making of social and peer-facing applications, developers & owners have to take account of the "open effect" and create the opportunities for there to be safeguards *all over the bloody place*. This has to be looked at more seriously - and there are many easy ways to do this, including an examination of permissions in far more detail. Yahoo 360 goes part of the way there, including the "groupware" permissions of Yahoo groups in its otherwise fairly standard onion layer approach. Some providers have also included parental permissions for younger kids (does my kid really know this person?) but that is also dodgy, given the story above (why does my kid want to know person X? Who are they? - when it could be a secret boyfriend / girlfriend or simply a mentor, for example - aha, it could also be Mr McNasty, the evil teen-impersonator, you say. Well yes, it could be. As I say, it is an extremely thorny issue, but can be attacked in a number of ways across more fronts than simple permissions & parental controls).
There needs to be a balance between privacy and openness, and for my money, the only way this could work is to have a commonly accepted minimum set of requirements / code of practice, otherwise you end up with some apps being lionised as useless, censored crap, and all kids, hip or otherwise (peer pressure's a great thing) going off in to the hinterlands to find un"censored" versions.
That it itself is a) difficult to argue without it becoming a forum for those who would prefer the entire interweb to be policed and b) shrug... it ain't going to happen in my lifetime, realistically, is it.
Tis something we grapple with every day, and it makes the applications we host now really unpopular, because we have limits on usage. I don't have the immediate answers at my fingertips, but I do think if the right people sat round tables and agreed industry standards, then the righht solutions would come a hell of alot easier.
Anyway. Blah blah blah. Privacy ain't dead.
There's an interesting interjection you could make here regarding MSN Spaces and China, but I will do that some other time.
Posted by cait at February 6, 2006 12:42 PM