Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
In all my work on online child safety issues, I always try to stress how important education and media literacy efforts are. Indeed, technical parental control tools and methods, while important, should be viewed as just one part of a more holistic approach to encouraging digital literacy and digital citizenship. In recent years, many scholars [...]
Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.” Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work–talk [...]
My friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, two of America’s leading experts on Internet safety matters, have just released a terrific new “Online Safety 3.0” manifesto. Anne is the editor of Net Family News, Larry pens the “Safe and Secure” blog for CNet News, and together they run ConnectSafely.org. Everything they do is must-reading for [...]
I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” [...]
My friend Larry Magid, the co-director of ConnectSafely.org (with Anne Collier) and founder of SafeKids.com, has a sharp new piece up at CBS News.com entitled, “Stop Cyberbullying with Education,” in which he rightly points out how “we need to be careful with legislation that would outlaw cyberbullying.” He points out that although cyberbullying is “not [...]
As Berin mentioned last week, we have a new paper out on proposals to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. We generically refer to those COPPA-expansion efforts as “COPPA 2.0.” Hence, the title of our paper: “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.” To [...]
Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.” As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most [...]
My friend Anne Collier of Net Family News, one of America’s great sages on child safety issues, has produced a terrific list of reasons “Why Technopanics are Bad.” Technopanics and moral panics are topics I’ve spent quite a bit of time commenting on here. (See 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anne is a rare voice of [...]
Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation. At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Meanwhile, state and local lawmakers — specifically [...]
May 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
