In her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other, Sherry Turkle observes that the concern for privacy is downgraded in preference for the openness of the network. Some argue that if you don’t want people you don’t know to see or know what you post, don’t post it.
Turkle asks: “Are bad people really the only one’s who need privacy?”
For children especially, this is a concern because the “openness” of the Internet provides predators with windows into the hearts and minds of our innocent ones.
Recently, the Australian reported that a former band manager, John Raymond Zimmerman, used social network sites to groom girls as young as 12 for sexual encounters. Sometimes he used fake on-line profiles, but in each case he was able to gather enough information about the child’s interests and problems to secure their trust.
Laurel White, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of California in Sacramento, explained that prior to the Internet, child predators used to engage in crimes of opportunity. Today they are grooming many children at once, like Zimmerman, using their victims’ social networks as leverage to secure trust and then extort them into sexual encounters.
And yet a recent story in Physorg.com addresses how parents are permitting and assisting children younger than 13 years of age to set up Facebook accounts. Much of the reasoning reported by moms interviewed involved a desire to prepare their children to have positive on-line experiences - and respond to the pressure to be “on-line” which is intense for the young ones.
It remains nevertheless, that social network website applications like Facebook are really designed for adult audiences who are expected to make decisions about what to share and how to protect privacy. As it turns out, it is very challenging for adults to stay on top of it; hence Facebook is going through some additional privacy hoops in Europe for 2012.
Parent Resources
- Parenting in the Network Culture
- Relating Authority in the Network Culture
- U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of California, Sacramento Office
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