Child Privacy and Protection–The Next Generation

At ISTE 2010, I met Christopher Craft. Christopher is a distinguished educator, Google Certified Teacher, Ph.D. candidate and a fan of Microsoft (comment below if I am misquoting you Christopher.)

Our chat was brief, but he asked me an interesting question.

“Why doesn’t Microsoft make a social location-based services akin to Foursquare for Education?”  

Christopher suggested that students could check-in while they were on field trips and geotag photos they took all at once. 

My original response was that Photosynth would be a great application to meet Christopher’s request.  Photosynth allows you to geotag photos after submission in case you do not have a camera with global positioning system (GPS) metadata to tag your photos while taking pictures. I recently did this with a Photosynth I created of Burnett Park in Fort Worth, TX. However, Christopher insisted that the geotag data needed to be real-time.

The Federal Trade Commission has already set forth rules regarding online protection and privacy for children in The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.  Students under the age of thirteen require their parents consent before any commercial website operator can collect personal information from them. 

For example, Microsoft prevents anyone from seeing my daughter’s activities online because she is a minor.  Any actions she wishes to take with her account, I must approve them before they can execute.

That is how things work in the online world.  However, location-based services are a blend between the online world and the physical world.

So what if my daughter’s physical presence or whereabouts were available online?

As a parent, I would not consent to sharing that data with anyone outside our family.  Moreover, you would have to go further to convince me that there is some academic merit in sharing location-based data about my child.  The real trick is that most parents and schools may have consented to sharing this information without their full understanding that they did.

Kim Cameron, the father of the Laws of Identity, wrote about Apple’s new “privacy policy” that he encountered while attempting to download a new app on his iPhone. Kim discovered that Apple’s new, 45-page privacy policy states, “if you use Apple products Apple can disclose your device fingerprints and location to whomever it chooses and for whatever purpose:”

While the policy asserts that data it collects has no direct association with any specific individual, you should read what information they do collect.

When COPPA was conceived, most school-age children did not have mobile phones or other devices that had continuous Internet access or GPS.  Today, the devices themselves are sharing information about who and where you are without the device owner needing to access a specific application to do so.  Hansel and Gretel would have loved to be children today. The only birds they would have to worry about are their friend’s tweets.

There may be a valid argument for location-based services in elementary education. However, there is a dark side. As I write this, I am looking at the profile of stranger on the location-based service Gowalla.  A women has shared all of the locations she has checked-in publicly.  The name of the establishments she frequents, the frequency of her visits, and the associated Google map provide a lot of pattern information. Moreover, her friends’ comments on her check-ins are also public. The site shows her full name and her photo.  Do children need these types of location-based services?  NBC’s Chris Hansen has his hands full already, do you believe we should provide more digital information about our children online?

I will close with a final note from my ISTE 2010 reading in the June 7, 2010 issue of Forbes Magazine.  The article “Disclosed to Death” by Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider tells about the misconception that more disclosure is better for consumers.  Over recent years, we have had a series of federal legislative actions to ensure that consumers are more informed and better protected.  The research uncovers that more disclosure is not better. In fact, the majority of consumers do not read disclosure statements (in our case privacy policies) because on the legalese that they are written.  To prove their point, the scientists conducted an April Fool’s Day experimented with consumers of British retailer Gamestation.  The experiment presented consumers with an agreement before shopping. If they opt-out they would receive a £5 discount on their purchase.  Well, over 7,500 online shoppers sold their eternity because they did not read the “immortal soul clause.”

Here is the rub:

• Location-based services are on the rise, along with an increase in smartphone purchases. There is a high likelihood that even our young children will have some mobile device that collects and transmit their location data in the near future.
• Schools and parents need to read and understand the disclosure and privacy policies of the commercial devices that they use for learning. Before you consent, you should ensure that you understand what you are exchanging on your child’s behalf for usage of a mobile device or online Internet service.
• COPPA is under review to reflect the new world. The current rule does not include location-based services as individually identifiable information.

Resources:

• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
• Microsoft’s Comment on COPPA Rules