5 Dangerous Things
An excellent talk from Gever Tulley entitled Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. Working with kids online we are faced with the challenges inherent in providing safe online experiences. Many of the measures (I’m thinking of COPPA specifically) provide what I consider to be false assurances. In theory they protect the privacy of children. In reality they do very little and, in fact, they may do harm by giving kids and parents a false sense of security. This is what went through my mind when watching Gever’s talk.
At the recent Dust or Magic conference a presenter gave their solution – a proprietary web browser that would only allow the user to access a specific list of approved destinations. The project is financed in large part through sponsorship with major childrens brands such as Shrek. To me this was a solution that in some ways is worse than the problem it seeks to solve. Lock the doors, pull the curtains and pull the phone from its plug.
Everyone needs to learn to be careful with the information they share online. I’m much more concerned with the risk this poses to the digitally uninitiated (read me parents) than children who have grown with these technologies. Maybe it’s time to take Tulley’s ideas and extend them to think about the pitfalls of our current approach to online safety for kids?