MySpace Age Verification - for Parents 391
unlametheweak writes "North Carolina is thinking of the children by passing a law requiring parents to verify they are parents before letting their children onto social networking sites. Notwithstanding the whole concept of an Internet ID for people in general; children are now being tracked by cellular phones with GPS, spied upon with Parent Controls (MS Vista has built-in parental spyware), and also strategically placed Nanny Cams, keyboard loggers, etc. 'Few of the proposals we've seen so far seem like good ways to [protect children], but North Carolina's approach at least has the virtue of novelty--unlike most video game legislation, which relies on similar rhetoric but has been almost universally struck down by the courts, sometimes at great cost to the states.' Is the zoo-like Minority Report world in which children are growing up in today doing more harm than good? How will this affect a 14 year old, much less a 17 year old "child"?"
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Technology isn't a replacement for caring about your children or spending time with them. But how is parental controls for a PC any different than locking up guns if you own them? It isn't an issue of totally relying on technology to baby site or paying attention to your child. Technology is a tool, why not use it? As as far as GPS tracking cell phones? Why ever not? Children do get lost and sometimes they lie about where they are going. A parent does have the right to know where their kids are at all times. How is it any different than calling them asking them where they are? Frankly it is a little less intrusive and a lot less effective to check up on a GPS than calling them. A smart kid will just leave their phone at a friends house if they really want to be sneaky.
I see nothing wrong with a parent knowing where their child is and where their child surfs on the Internet. Yes it can go far like bugging their room or phone but like everything else the application of technology in parenting can be a good tool if used correctly.
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Two words. Trust and respect.
If you're spying on your kid, you're telling them that you don't trust them. That you don't respect them. Great thing to tell your child.
"How is it [GPS in a phone] any different than calling them asking them where they are?"
Letsee... you know, sometimes kids WANT thier parents to call?
I'd gotten myself into situations where I wasn't comfortable. Yet, I knew that my parents would call to check up on me... and when they did, I knew that I'd be able to say something like, "What do you mean I have to come home?", and that they'd be there to pick me up. They also wouldn't ask questions unless I started talking first.
By spying on them instead of, *gasp*, TALKING to them, you've removed that escape route.
Besides, as you said, spying on them like that is worthless... They'll just redirect thier phone to call thier friends, and leave thier own at an "approved" location. Or worse, they'll do as you suggested, and do without the redirect. Then you'll mistakenly think they're safe, have no way to contact them, and they're without thier phone to contact you. Congrats.
Trust and respect are wonderful things. Destroying them for a little peace of mind isn't the correct choice to make. Besides, any peace of mind you get is gone as soon as you wake up and realize that your kids know that you're spying and are now working at hiding things from you.
From looking at my friends and thier relationships with thier parents as both kids and adults I know that I'm thankful as hell that my parents showed me trust and respect. When I went to uni, I'd been trusted to make my own unrestricted decisions about who to hang out with, when I came home, etc for a couple of years. My parents knew who I was with and what I was doing (for the most part
I'll leave you to imagine what my friends did at uni and what I didn't do... but it should be pretty obvious... I didn't have the desire to prove that I was on my own and could make decisions without my parents stepping on me.
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Indeed.
When I was 19 and off at uni, I wound up calling my parents wanting thier input on the idea of going drinking with friends. (19 is underage for those of y'all outside of the US)
If they'd been spying on me my whole life, this would have been nothing more than one more thing that I would have had to hide. Instead, my parents got to be involved with my decision, and I took thier input seriously.
Compare that to one of my old high-school friends when as soon as he turned 18, moved halfway across the country, and the last time his parents saw him was when he wound up in a 3-day coma following a OD...
Well, maybe there's a reason that I'm so strongly against spying on your kids...
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My girlfriend's daughter is 11. She opened up a myspace profile with very suggestive photos and a stated age she was
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So don't do it secretly! (Score:2)
You may use this computer in any manner you like. There will be no attempts to block or filter content.
But I will be monitoring everything you do with it.
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Why will you be monitoring it? Will there be acceptable behaviour lines that they won't know about until they cross them?
Will you talk to your children about what is acceptable first? Will you let them use the Internet before you trust them to behave themselves? Or are you just trying to train them to avoid surveillance (probably a useful skill in modern society)?
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My parents would simply talk to me. They'd ask who I was hanging out with and where I'd be. Then they'd *trust* me. It's amazing how important that "T" word is. They made it a point to open the house to my friends... so they'd know who my friends were, what they were like, get to know them more than simply as that kid down the street. They set limits, and expected me to respect them, and trusted me enough not to go snooping around. Yeah, they didn't know everything that I did, but then you can't know everything your kid does no matter how much you spy. Only way to know everything they do is to lock them in a closet and never let them out.
Spying is bad because if your kid ever knows (and he will), you've effectively destroyed any relationship built on trust and respect. Your child now knows that you don't trust him. That you don't respect him. How anyone thinks that a kid can be brought up well in an environment like that... I just don't understand.
But hey, what do I know. It's not like I was ever a kid.
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Honestly in my home there will never be a computer which is not locked down and in the family room.
So, you want your children to grow up with no expectation of privacy? I had my own computer from about the age of 11. It was an old 8086 that my father's company had decided was no longer needed. I learned simple programming. Eventually, I got a 386 laptop in exchange for some web design (very simple stuff, back when Netscape 2.0 was very new). I got a 14.4kbaud modem for a birthday (13 or 14, I think), and an internet connection. When I was around 15, my parents got a second phone line put in to my
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But the internet is a whole new problem. Parents that stick a computer in their hands with no supervision is like giving kids their own personal vehicle to go anywhere they want and do anything
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This brings up the old question about legally being an adult.
When you become 18 you can vote, smoke, be in a porn, watch porn, and serve in the army but you cannot drink.
(unless of course you serve in the military and serve overseas in a nation that allows 18 for drinking while on base leave)
Obviously there is some type of discrepancy of what it means to be an adult here.
And a
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Problem solved. Besides, I reiterate that kids should never expect total freedom. The only place they should ever expe
Pendulum may swing back for next generation (Score:2)
Perhaps when this generation has grown up, they will be determined not to "become" like their parents, by rejecting invasive spying, and encouraging trust and responsibility. Or perhaps the opposite may come true, since they won't know what trust is, they won't ever be able to trust anyone else, and simply perpetuate their own parinoia o
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Hence the relatively recent term "helicopter mom".
Nowadays, parents go to websites of organizations their children might even have the slightest possibility of associating with and yell at them if there's anything even slightly objectionable.
I can sort of see this for high schoolers, but recently the webmaster account of the website of one of my former organizations (Cornell University Marchi
Why is technology not good for parenting, too? (Score:2)
It's my computer, my internet, and my house. I have every right to know what my child is doing on my computer, using my internet, in my house.
Why
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And before all the morons jump in with all their little single instance exceptions to their Kafka-esque concept of omnipresent spying and intrusions, let me point it that it's a spectrum. At 12 years old, a parent should pretty much know everything about the kid. Perhaps not the minutiae, but enough that the details are irrelevant. At 17 years old, if the parent hasn't learned that their kid is reasonably smart, honest and starting to gain some wisdom, then the amount of intrusiveness will be higher than if their child has shown good judgement.
And for all you kids who know you are smarter than your parents: a) you're not. b) as long as your parents are providing for your ass, they get to tell you what to do. c) the rules are not for there for all you unique and special flowers, but for the masses.
Trust but verify... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not and never have been my child's peer or friend - I'm a parent and the relationship between me and my child is and always will be asymmetrical.
As a parent I reserved the right to investigate any aspect of my child's life when I had reason to believe that the child was at risk - and investigations into my child's sexual activity or drug or alcohol or internet use are IMO appropriate.
Minor children have an inherent right not to be physically, sexually or emotionally abused - every other right a child has is granted by that child's legal guardian. My responsibility as a parent is to protect that child until (s)he can fend for itself.
My house, my rules. Doesn't matter if the child is fifteen or thirty-five - as long as they're under my roof I will determine what does (and does not) go on in my house. For example my imaginary twenty-five year old kid is legally able to smoke cigarettes. He's still not gonna smoke them in my house. He can pretty much come and go as he pleases - with the caveat that if you're not gonna come home that night you give Mom and Dad a call so they don't stay up worrying about whether you've wrapped your car around a tree or something. Don't know about other parents but I can't go to sleep if I have a child unaccounted for.
I trust my children and always have - that doesn't mean I didn't verify where they are (and with whom) from time to time. The internet was really only an issue with my youngest but I can and have used tools to determine what he was doing on the net and wouldn't hesitate to do so again if I had a kid in the house.
The parent poster mentions spying on your children - monitoring is not spying. My kids knew their entire lives that I might call to verify their whereabouts from time to time, check their homework, call their teachers to see how they were doing in school, occasionally check the odometer in the car and yes, even monitor their internet use. As I said in the title, trust but verify.
My children also know how much I love them. They're not peers or friends and never will be - they are my children and that relationship brings both additional benefits and additional responsibilities. Doesn't mean I don't hoist a glass with my kids or seek their counsel sometimes - they're adults now and in charge of their own destiny and even though sometimes I don't agree with their decisions but I have learned to STFU and allow my kids to grow from their own choices - good or bad.
Holding parents responsible (Score:5, Insightful)
Fifty years ago, parents didn't have to watch so closely. There was far less media coming into the home, and what was available was far easier to monitor (and far more regulated, as it was all under the watchful eye of the FCC).
Now, we've got the internet. We've got a half-dozen game consoles. We've got cable and satellite television, dirt-cheap movies and music available for purchase, and a barrage of information everywhere we look. For parents to keep the same level of attention on what their kids are doing, they have to use tools like "spyware" (you know, software that lets them know what THEIR computers are being used for) to keep track of their kids and look for dangerous behavior.
I've got to say, though, that I object to nanny cams unless there is a very specific reason to have one. If you smell pot in your living room, maybe it's a good time to put in a camera to see if your kid is using illegal drugs. But putting up a camera *just in case* is paranoid.
Parents have to monitor their kids. Every generation has done so in some fashion. So long as kids know the rules, know they are being watched, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I wouldn't let my kids go certain places in the city without me being around because it's risky for them; the same goes for the internet.
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Not that this will work, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
As Ronald Reagan said, "trust, but verify". There is nothing wrong with knowing what your child is doing on a home computer. There is nothing wrong with knowing where your child is. A child doesn't have the right to conceal their activities/whereabouts from his/her parents.
Again, I think legislative efforts like this have it all wrong. I just object to the summary's use of "spying" as applied to what I call "responsible parenting."
Another thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once they are desensitized to the idea of not having privacy, it will get easier to get them to conform to whatever the people in power want.
You are in big trouble young AltGrendel (Score:2)
It's a good thing we log everything you post to Slashdot, because your attitude is unacceptable. Just wait until your father CtlGrendel gets home, then your backside will learn what it's like to be "desensitezed to the idea of not having piracy". your mother DelGrendel.
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I don't see how giving kids free reign teaches them about responsibility and consequences. In fact, I believe that doing so teaches them the exact opposite.
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I will not spy on them. Unless they give me a reason to. Trust is something I usually give until proven that it was misplaced. It is rather hard to regain, though, once lost. The consequence of fu..ing up is simply that I will take a very close l
Is this the cause, or a symptom? (Score:2)
Let the government be parents (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how politicians will throw anything into the political arena during crunch time (races...). Just how do they propose to keep track of "name changes" from a sex offender. For starters they can't even maintain their own equipment [infiltrated.net], can't secure the FBI infrastructure [wired.com], a company for MySpace is already reporting false positives... [wired.com]. Should we wait for the FBI's new and improved Carnivore [infiltrated.net]?
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Name changes are administered by the courts. The state has a list of sex offenders. The court checks the list when someone requests a name change. It hardly requires hacking anyone's brain.
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be from North Carolina... (Score:4, Insightful)
We have the most brain-dead General Assembly in the world. This lot couldn't pour
piss out of a boot if the instructions were stamped on the heel.
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I don't think parental controls are a grea
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You might be ready to let a 14 year old drive a car, but I sure as hell am not. In fact I'd support raising the minimum age to get a lisence to 18, considering how many accidents are caused by young, irresponsible drivers.
Yes, people in this age group are no longer merely children. That doesn't make them adults though. That comes with responsibility and
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What I assume you're trying to shoot for is som
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And they are idiots.
Frankly I wish we could restore adolescence. 14 year olds can reproduce but as a whole they are lacking in self control and wisdom. The real problem is that adolescent behavior is continuing into what used to be adulthood. Yes fourteen year olds are and twenty-five year-olds are acting more and more alike. Here is a clue it isn't the fourteen year-olds acting more adul
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Where do you draw the line in any case? 14? So you want a 14 year old deciding whether it is safe to have a beer (at 65lbs it will only take one to get him/her d
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countdown until rebellion (Score:2)
I'm all for spying on kids. The more, the better (Score:2)
The most valuable thing I have now is privacy. I had none when I was a kid and, damn, how did I want some!
Spying leads to spying (Score:2)
Not too well:
1) It will create people that are used to being spied on. When they grow up and more spying comes along, they will accept it without blinking an eye.
or
2) It will backfire. When they become teenagers, they will want to strongly oppose all kinds of authority just for the sake of opposing authority. When done by a large number of irresponsible people, that could do more harm than good, and result in further spying.
or
3) It
Maturity (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's harmful (Score:3, Insightful)
It's definitely harmful to them to have to read such hysterical FUD as that sentence. For that reason, they should not be allowed to read
Children are, for the most part, smart enough to know what to ignore. It's adults playing power games who use children in their arguments for reasons that really have nothing to do with children, and everything to do with not having faith in their ability to make their point without appeal to emotion.
Obligatory Star Wars... (Score:3, Funny)
Internet access on Tatooine (Score:5, Funny)
Re:17 year olds are not children (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:17 year olds are not children (Score:4, Funny)
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<quote>then, in your opinion, at what age does this immaturity magically disappear?</quote>
Well, according to the auto insurance companies [wikipedia.org], age 25 is statistically a good indicator that they better understand risks. I also believe that there is some sort of evidence [washingtonpost.com] that brain maturation isn't complete until around that age.
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As for auto insurance companies, they raised the "pond scum" age to _30_ a while back for unmarried males.
There's also an implicit and, I think, erroneous judgement in your claim that younger people don't understand risks. While they certainly _take_ more ri
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NANKI POO: But I would wait until you were of age!
YUM-YUM: You forget that in Japan girls do not arrive at years of discretion until they are fifty.
NANKI-POO: True; from seventeen to forty-nine are considered years of indiscretion....
The MIKADO - W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan
Re:17 year olds are not children (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is since we expect people to be adults at 18, they'd better be pretty damn close to it by 17. Close enough that we shouldn't have to spend so much energy protecting them from themselves.
Re:17 year olds are not children (Score:5, Insightful)
They sound just like adults, to me...
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I have worked with several kind of children and adolescents throughout my lifetime, both from the best and worse of parental backgrounds.
What I have come to learn is that even young adolescents from bad parental backgrounds are more mature that full grown adults from a good parental background. This is mainly due to the placement of responsibility on the child that occurs when there aren't no parents around to take the blame ore be held responsible for the adolescent's behavior.
Once a kid, able of abstrac
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I have a big problem with those "magical" ages. I rememeber well when I turned 18. It didn't feel so different from the day before that mythical date. Generally, I was the same person. Nothing had changed. No greater spirit suddenly filled my head with sensibility and responsibi
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Choice 2: Hover over them every second they're on the computer to make sure they never break the rules or do anything dangerous.
Choice 3: Teach them and use monitoring software to routinely check up on their activities and see if they're doing anything wrong that you need to address.
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PROFIT
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You can create good policies, you can create great efficient and useful documentation on policies and procedures for users, and you can have info sessions to help personally education users. None of these things is a substitute for good traffic monitoring and anti-virus software. Of course you need to educate kids, empower them to grow and mature, turn control over a little at a time but you have stewardship over their lives for a season and while you cant make them good pe
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Does the law say because its a sin or is this your swag?
Want to get a NC drivers license to replace your out of state be prepared to:
Bring your old license Ditto for NY and MN (Unless you want to take a full drivers test)
Your SS card Most states have id verification which consist of a combo SS, mail, Passport, and others
Birth certificate See ab
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You do realize marriage is also a civil institution, the law is not about sin.
I lived in NY state (Poughkeepsie and in way upstate). My DMV experience was never bad like that. Either you got unlucky or I was lucky.
I lived in NY 25 years, My wife lived there close to 20 and you were very lucky. The NY DMV is terrible.
Re:NC is a scary place (Score:2)
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As for 'every state'
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Well, if you promise to age-verify for them so they can get on myspace when their luddite parents won't, then thanks to this new law you'll be in with a chance!
Facebook what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Facebook what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe these kids like to go online. Facebook can be a useful site for organizing events, like parties or trips. But OH NO! CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET! Obviously, legislation should be passed to waste taxpayers' money to "protect" them, because obviously the internet is a DANGEROUS place, because it's SCARY, and the only the government should choose how kids spend their time!
For what it's worth, I hate MySpace because it's too ugly and customizable (which just makes it uglier), and Facebook is becoming another MySpace.
This whole thing about facebook and all these sites is just ridiculous.
Right, because the government should have better things to do than to interfere with things, just because people are inherently scared of those kids and their JAZZ MUSIC or whatever happens to be new at the time.
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Not the didn't, but the last time I checked the predators didn't come looking for minors on Slashdot, or through the TV, or Usenet but they do take advantage of the kids on facebook and myspace.
Most parents and children are clueless as to how public their information is and how vulnerable they become. At no point in time before was it possible for the kids to expose their personal stuff to so many people. Internet is great, I don't doubt, but it is a tool that one has to
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Predators also look for kids OUTSIDE! Let's make all visits to the park require parental supervision!
Most parents and children are clueless as to how public their information is and how vulnerable they become. At no point in time before was it possible for the kids to expose their personal stuff to so many peo
Re:Facebook what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, and your solution to this is to get rid of the cyberworld? Or just wall it off?
The others poster's point remains. This is not a new situation. This happens all the time when new technologies break onto the world. Historically, technology changes faster than people do. In truth, people can change much faster, but they rarely have any need to. During the industrial revolution, factories changed life in astounding ways. It took decades for people to catch up. The first mass-produced food had a tendency to be of lower quality, some of it bordering on dangerous (sawdust in the sausages, anyone?). The number of problems and dangers people faced because of factories has been the subject of thousands of doctoral papers. Do you really think we should have outlawed them back then? Or maybe we'll just prevent our children from ever going near them or using anything that came from one. While it might have been good advice to keep your kids from working in one, segregating them from the segment of society best suited to adapt to the changes produced by them is a pretty horrible idea.
Let's take a situation that's easier to understand. Did you ever learn how to drive? No matter how great you thought you were at it, you were unsafe. Even for the first year or more after getting a driver's license, your chances of being in a fatal accident on the interstate vastly exceed a child's chances of meeting a predator online. So how should we solve this problem? I know: Since people are dangerous drivers when they are learning to drive, let's forbid people from ever learning how to drive.
Stupid, isn't it? You have to learn sometime. Maybe we should just make them wait until they're older... because that's one sure way to completely avoid solving the real problem. We could dissolve the interstate system. Or drop the speed limit to 30 mph. These are all great ideas that are doomed to completely fail.
People have to learn. People need to learn. The world needs them to learn. This is how things change and get better. Wall your kids off from the Internet and you'll have kids who aren't adapting to the world as quickly as they should. Yes, I know the same old If you had kids... idiocy is on its way. The problem isn't with the internet. The problem is with the kids. If they are doing something unsafe, teach them. They'll learn. They'll learn faster than you will. They'll adapt with frightening efficiency if you help them.
It's very simple really. I don't put up a billboard showing the world my life in the real world, but I'm not a hermit either. My friends know more about me than the rest of the world. I feel safe talking to them because I know who they are and I recognize them. I don't go sharing details about myself with strangers. The Internet is no different. I have friends and I talk with them openly because I know who they are. If all they are to me is an alias, then that's all I am to them. It's really very simple.
This illustrates my point exactly. By now everyone knows to avoid the guy giving out candy. If we teach children how to be safe, in five or ten years everyone will know to avoid the guy who goes around asking people what their address or real name are. Of course, the more people we have who choose to (cowardly, in my opinion) hide their children instead of actually teaching them how to be safe, the longer this will take.
Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
So saying, "ZOMG MySpace is rife with sex predators!" is essentially meaningless; they're no more prevalent there than anywhere else. People love to cling to the illusion that the bad people of the world are all faceless evil people lurking ion the shadows, and it's just not true. But the media is pushing the idea, and parents are eating it up.
Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or kids will sign up for accounts as 18 year olds and make the whole issue worse.
When it comes right down to it there is no substitute for knowing what your kids are doing. Sure, keep an eye on 'em, but don't pull some sneaky, underhanded crap, because then you turn it into a contest; your ability to spy vs their ability to evade, and they'll probably have more time and motivation than you do, which puts you at a serious disadvantage.
As long as you show an interest, and can keep your cool and not lose your fricking mind when they deviate from what you would wish that they would do, they'll keep you informed. But if you make them feel like they can't trust you to know about their lives without trying to completely control their lives, they'll lie to you, and they'll lie to you specifically about the stuff you'll most need to know about.
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Ugh. Sorry, I was a bit careless with the closing tags. This should be easier to read.
Oh, so we should let them have sex with adults since they are 10 and let them drink since they are 5 because, hey who is Uncle Sam to say when they are mature enough.
Actually, I was referring to the mentality of "Think of the children" to justify any and all measure made in the name of protecting the young ones, but the instant the clock strikes midnight and the individual turns 18, they suddenly are judged to be capa
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I still don't do 'social networking,' but I run a private NNTP server for a few of my friends (even the non-technical ones can use it fairly easily from Outlook Express or Thunderbird), and it's a
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The TV was the 90s babysitter. Myspace is this decade's. You can call it censoring the internet on their behalf and impinging on their freedoms- I don't really car
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I just want to point out the bitter irony in your question. Here we are, utilizing the internet (mankind's greatest achievement) in order to have a [mostly] reasoned discussion about privacy, and you're using this moment to ask whether children even need to be able to utilize it for communications - the purpose for which the network was designed and the thing that makes the internet great.
No, by all means! Children should only be allowed to use the int
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When I was growing up, I had to prove that I could safely and sanely handle something before I was allowed to use it unsupervised. It did not matter what it was; be it a phone, a computer, a gun, a chainsaw, a hammer, or a toy. When something new came into the picture, it would be allowed in the living room, where a parent could watch at first