Privacy Rules For Child Internet Use Under Scrutiny

Data mining is inevitable result of the modern Internet boom. Everything a person does, says, emails, and posts finds its way in the public domain with little legislation existing or being enforced to protect the privacy of citizens. This includes children, but the Federal Trade Commission is in the midst of trying to do something about that. New rules would include enhanced need for parental permission for children to enact certain types of activities and regulations on the way companies handle data from, and about, children. The Child Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 enacts such regulations, but modern advances have rendered these rules outdated.

It’s hard to argue with this, children certainly need to be protected, but I think we are failing to understand the scope of the issue. It has nothing to do with children. Privacy in general, for all humans beings, is being drastically changed by our access to the Internet. Limiting companies abilities to use the data associated with children’s makes sense, but when one considers the vast scope of the internet, the challenges become enormous. Even if major companies comply there are millions of minor ones that will never be examined. All types of security protocols are created to prevents users from doing tasks on the internet, and all of them are broken. Ironically, they are often broken by gifted teenage hackers. The internet has changed the fundamentally changed the social life of human beings. If we are going to figure out the privacy protocols for children we are going to have to change the privacy protocols for every user on the system. The same mechanisms put in to track children will inevitably, legally or illegally, be used to track adults. The only effective  system is going to have to be built into the foundation of the Internet itself; this will leave the potential for abuse high. I don’t know about you, but I do not trust multinational corporations with this sort of power.