Parenting in the Age of Online Social Networks

*Philippine Panorama

July 22, 2012

Vol. 41, No. 30

A father once wrote on his son’s Facebook wall, “Hi, Danny!  How are you?  Your mom and I are okay.  We miss you.  Please come downstairs.  We’re in the living room.”  This joke illustrates how Facebook and other online social networks have crept into homes, unsettling parents already troubled by digital age contraptions pulling their children away from schoolwork and family.

With one in six people on the planet owning accounts in Facebook and other online social networks and with about one in three Filipinos registered in a social network, it is not surprising if some Filipino children and preadolescents want a social network account as much as they wish for a mobile or gaming console.  The trouble begins here because a federal law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits websites such as Facebook from collecting names and other personal information from users younger than 13 years old without first obtaining “verifiable parental consent.”

Facebook and other websites covered by COPPA have set 13 years old as their minimum age limit for all users.  Complying with COPPA would have made the social network theoretically free of underage users.  Reality says that the website had approximately 7.5 million under-13 users in 2011, with some of them joining the site with their parents’ help.  Despite its efforts to kick out 20,000 underage users every day, the banned users’ reentry and young converts to Facebook ensure a steady supply of illegal members to expel from the network.

Seven and a half million users out of Facebook’s more than 900 million users is a minuscule minority, but it refers to children and preteens who are exploring a largely adult world where they are exposed to age-inappropriate material, predators, and bullies.  Parents should not rely on Facebook’s anti-bullying tools because the system is like a police officer reacting to a crime after its commission rather than a thick fence keeping the wolves off the sheep.

Threats to a child’s online privacy and safety should not just be a parent’s major concern when his child is in a social network.  American psychologists have discussed the possible negative effects of online social networking on a child’s behavior.  This can be as mild as increased narcissism to serious disorders such as anxiety, depression, aggressiveness, mania, and antisocial behavior.

Children and preteens active in social networks also do not perform well in school.  On the other hand, adolescents in social networks display more empathy to their online friends while the introverts among them are encouraged to socialize at least online.

Psychologists opine that parents should establish a guideline for their children’s social networking and other online activities instead of imposing restrictions that their young can circumvent anyway.  They should also not be complacent once Facebook implements its proposal to set parental controls on the accounts of its under-13 users.

Most of all, some parents should not have helped their children fool the age restriction set by Facebook and other networks in the first place.  By that act alone, they have already taught their young that dishonesty is permissible in society.

-Prospero Pulma Jr.

Online Privacy and Social Networks

Creepy is an unusual description for a business agreement, yet an online privacy watchdog used creepy to describe Twitter’s decision to allow a company access to Tweets dating back to January 2010.  The company will mine about 250 million Tweets daily by its own estimate for information and sell the data to businesses for their marketing campaigns.  Old tweets that many believe will remain in the archives or disappear completely will now return in the form of advertising campaigns to haunt their authors.  Twitter has some company in its misery.

German authorities rapped Facebook in 2011 for the social network’s facial recognition software that automatically tags photos uploaded to the site, although users can disable the automatic tagging feature.  Facebook claims that the program is a godsend to users who upload entire albums at a time with scores of friends to tag, but Internet rights advocates and fans of spy films believe otherwise.  Facebook’s use of user data and increasing public access to the profiles of its 845 million users are also noxious stimulants to privacy activists.

Online privacy advocates saw a red flag in the re-sharing option of Google Plus that enables content shared within a user’s inner circle to spread beyond his close friends.  Activists saw another red flag in Google’s plan to link its social network to its other services that can expose the identities of users who are using pseudonyms in Gmail, YouTube, and other Google services.  The plan will unmask JohnnyD’Hunk on YouTube as a skinny man.  Google has also wrestled with US attorneys general over its new privacy policy that combines user information from its different services into one.

With about one in six people owning a social network account, the temptation and pressure to join an online social network are overwhelming and the opportunities to disclose much more than a user’s real name, date of birth, and gender that he provided upon registration too numerous.

By requiring users to reveal personal information upon registration, teasing people to broadcast even their breakfasts to the world, and through corporate and computer software ingenuity, online social networking gnaws at a person’s privacy until what is left of the curtain that blinds the world to a man’s secrets is a diaphanous veil.

 

-Prospero Pulma Jr.