Facebook, “…lavishes you with attention from the people that you love the more you disclose about your life,” says Cory Doctorow in a Ted talk.The disconnect between disclosure and negative consequences (in time or because you never find out) frustrates adults trying to warn kids about the dangers of saying too much on Facebook or any other internet application. (It makes it hard to caution about the dangers of smoking and poor diet too.)
Like me, Cory is unimpressed with the available monitoring programs for watching your children. We both believe they don’t work that well; it is too easy for kids to get around. He goes in another direction as well; it teaches kids that surveillance by authority figures is okay. In fact, he goes on, any of the tools that we would like our kids to have in order to protect themselves (encryption, proxy servers, cleaning out cookies) defeats not only those who want to steal our childrens’ information, it also defeats the parental monitoring and control programs.
As a start, he would like us to promote privacy and educate our children so that the default question is, “Why do you need to know that?”
via BoingBoing
