John C. Dvorak’s excellent blog reminds us about an Internet classic: the Telemarketing Counterscript, which could be helpful if you’re one of the 12 people with numbers not yet in the do not call registry. Now, if you want to go all high-tech about this issue, try the Telecrapper 2000.
Xanga, a MySpace type community that’s been around since 1999, has been fined $1 million by the FTC for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Here’s a C|Net article about it all.
Evidently Xanga was allowing accounts to be created even when the user declared that he or she was less than 13 years old.
According to their own media kit, which claimed 5.5 million unique visitors last November, their audience consists of 1.3 million kids 12-17, some percentage of which are 12, as well as 200,000 kids 2-11. According to December 2005 Media Metrix numbers, Xanga received 863,000 unique visitors from kids 2-11.
Is all this under-13 Xanga traffic online simply to visit the blogs of older kids? I doubt it. It’s kids updating their own Xanga blogs (which would mean they’re registered Xanga members) and visiting the blogs of friends in their same school grade.
That Xanga didn’t have “verifiable parental permission” to collect info from kids under 13 is what cost them the largest COPPA fine ever levied by the FTC. That they weren’t taking COPPA provisions into account in this day and age given that they have a significant under-13 membership is blithering idiocy.
Takeaway for marketers: Online privacy can’t be emphasized enough, particularly where kids are involved. If you operate a Web site that kids under 13 are likely to visit (even if it’s not a site specifically for kids), you need to be operating with COPPA in mind.
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
—Malcolm Forbes
Google News Archive Search is a new service that’s getting a lot of press. I even saw it mentioned on CNN yesterday.
The good news: You can search historical archives dating back to the 1700s, and view those results in a very user-friendly timeline format. The bad news: Most of the really interesting (i.e. pre-1900) results seem to be coming from just four major sources: Washington Post, Time, U.S. Supreme Court records, and NewspaperArchive.com. In most cases, you need to pay a fee to view the article.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend on Google’s cooperation with a Brazilian court order to turn over “data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.”
ClickZ had a brief report, but smartly observed: Are the people Brazil is going after all Brazilian, or are there non-Brazilians in their sights? The eWeek story has a few interesting reader comments.
Google, which said earlier this month that they see “government intrusions rather than accidental public disclosures of data as the greatest threat to online privacy,” is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the squeeze is only going to get tighter in the years to come.
On the one end of the spectrum, there’s hardly a soul out there who wouldn’t support any and all efforts to nab pedophiles, so we applaud Google cooperating with Brazil. On the other end, there’s the presumption of privacy that we all have when we search, visit Web sites and explore the Internet at large, so we applaud Google refusing to turn data over to a U.S. Dept. of Justice fishing expedition.
Between the two, though, there’s a vast grey area that’s muddied even further by variations in privacy law from state to state and country to country. Sooner or later, the lines will need to be drawn so that ISPs and Internet companies will know exactly what data they need to keep, for how long they have to keep it, to whom they’re required to turn it over and the conditions under which an individual’s private information should be revealed.
Over the next few years, we can expect to see a lot of activity in this area. It will all amount to nothing less than an elaboration of the fundamental definition of personal privacy and responsibility in the information age. If non-profit groups were openly traded stocks, I’d be bullish on EFF.
