A Consuming Experience

Friday, 19 February 2010

Children: 10 internet safety tips for parents & guardians

EU cyber-security agency ENISA have just published their suggested 10 internet safety tips for parents and guardians, to help preserve the security and privacy of children online.

Here they are in bold, with my notes added (in italics):

Communicate with your child about his/her Internet experience. Discuss the importance of Internet safety and teach the basics

See point 8 note 2, below.

Set house Internet and mobile phone rules

Note: see also ENISA's 17 golden rules on mobile privacy and security - not specific to kids, but still useful.

Educate yourself on the latest threats facing children online and have a good understanding of how your child spend his/her time online

Note: See Get Safe Online (UK), Stay Safe Online (US); and in more detail Ofcom's survey of online protection mechanisms
The EU do have a Safer Internet Programme including assessments of social networking sites.
Recently the EU assessed the child-safety of social networking sites against their Safer Social Networking Principles. You can read their summary and individual site-specific reports on the safety of individual social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook.

Keep the computer and any other Internet-enables devices used by your child in a common room. Install firewall and antivirus software

Note: on antivirus, etc, see some suggestions on free antivirus software & other software for online protection; and Microsoft have since released for free their Security Essentials antivirus.

Ensure parental control, parental consent, age verification and content lock are activated. Ensure barring process and filtering are in place

Note: it's a truism that many kids can easily get round these; nevertheless, they're worth considering. Thinkbroadband offers some brief info on parental controls etc; and see the more detailed Privacy Rights Clearinghouse guide.
Be warned - it's one thing if a parent monitors their children's activities online, but quite another if the company selling filtering or monitoring software collects and harvests info on what your kids do on the internet, and sell it to marketers. And they've done that.
Parental control software has also been known to block innocuous sites while letting unsafe sites through, and they may also censor sites based on the religious or political views of the software's proprietor.
You can tell I'm not a big fan of parental control software. I say, teach your children critical evaluation skills, bring them up to be sensible off line and online, and let them explore and learn - see my notes to point 8, below.

Analyse content providers’ policies and their compliance. Check contractual flexibility (e.g. how to delete an account) and use of automated moderation filters in conjunction with humans

Note: hmm, this might be tough for non-lawyers to do given sites' (deliberately?) long and obscure terms and policies!
It would be good if a site were to analyse policies etc and publicise the summaries. Rather like what the EU have done, see point 3 note 3, but on an ongoing basis. Anyone? Parents might be willing to subscribe.

Check your child’s page or profile on a regular basis. Track your child’s spending online carefully
Tell your child to never use full names and share passwords. Prevent your child from sharing personally identifiable information (e.g. address, telephone number, name of school, sport club).

Note: that should be "or" share passwords, shurely.
Child psychologist Dr Tanya Byron produced an excellent review for the UK government on children's use of the internet and videogames. From a 2008 speech of hers:
"Kids socialise via technology. Our culture is now so risk averse we don't let kids out into the streets - the radius for children has reduced by 80% since 1977. They can't go outside so they go online. They're tech savvy but haven't got the skills of critical evaluation to keep themselves safe…
Policing is pointless: Australia tried to set up blocking at ISP level, and within 24 hours a 14 year old boy had got round it by guessing his mother's password! It's not about prying, or even warning kids about predators online (in fact cyberbullying is their biggest fear); it's about supervision and thought.
Parenting is an online not just offline task. Parents need to talk to their children, make sure that they think, that they know who they're talking to: prepare their children to understand the risks, give them the tools and critical evaluation skills to check the reliability of sources and that people are who they say they are."

Ensure your child understand what it means to post photographs and any other content on Internet

Note: see note 2 to 8 above.

Educate your child by explaining never to arrange to meet in person someone he/she first met online. Warn your child about expressing emotions to strangers directly online.

Again, see note 2 to 8 above. It's really about good parenting, not installing software.

Tuesday, 16 February 2010

Blogger music blogs - what to do if you get a DMCA notice

If your music blog uses Blogger or Blogspot and you get a copyright infringement notification from Blogger under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows blogs etc to be taken down for copyright infringement, what should you do?

Check that you really were authorised by the copyright owner of the music to link to the music complained about (and that the upload of the file you link to was also authorised), or that you have a decent chance of arguing that your use of their content was "fair use".

Tip: see the Citizen Media Law Project's excellent note on Responding to a DMCA Takedown Notice Targeting Your Content for helpful info on the procedure and what's involved.
You might well want to seek US legal advice in your particular situation; the EFF do take on some cases, but only a very few.

If you're sure you have the copyright holder's permission or your use was fair use and you want to fight the take down, you can't just sit around - you need to send a counter-notice to Google ASAP. Here's how to send a DMCA counter-notification to Blogger. Note that:

Google do link to a helpful counter-notification generator which you can use to produce your DMCA counter-notice.
You have to say in your counter-notice that you believe in good faith that your content was wrongly removed - if you know it was actually infringing copyright, then you can't say that, you'll be done for perjury. So think about your justifications before you file the counter-notice. You have been warned!
Although copyright complaints can be submitted online via an infringement notice form, you have to send your counter-notice to Google by fax or hard copy post to the fax number or address they give. Yes this sucks if you're not in the USA as it will cost you extra time or money.

Generally, make sure that your email address in your Blogger profile is up to date, so that you don't miss getting any future emailed complaint notices from Blogger.

Team Blogger had recently clarified how they operate when they get complaints that a blog hosted on Blogger / Blogspot breaches copyright, but they didn't initially clarify how you as a blogger should respond, so if you missed the update to their blog post, then I repeat, see how to send a DMCA counter-notification to Blogger.

The good news is that now, rather than completely deleting the blogs complained about, following the negative publicity about "bad" takedowns Blogger are moving the blogs into draft so that if there was an error or the counter-notice is successful, the blog posts and links won't have been completely deleted as was the case before (though apparently they were still recoverable if subscribed to via Google Reader!).

The incidents where bloggers' blogs were taken down, in at least one case entirely by mistake when there hadn't even been a DMCA complaint, have been covered e.g. by the Guardian and Ars Technica.

This isn't legal advice etc, I just thought that a quick list of steps to take might be helpful, obviously if you need to you should consult a US copyright lawyer.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Blogger: update your blog template ASAP

If you use Blogger or Blogspot for your blog you've probably seen the announcements from Blogger when you login, and the blog post on the official Blogger Buzz, to update and review your blog templates in case they link to files hosted on Google Page Creator.

But if you use Windows Live Writer to publish your blog posts, like I now do, you may have missed the warning.

So just a reminder that over the next few days you'd better do what they suggest or links in your blog may break when Google take down their Page Creator. Which is a shame, it was so much more flexible than Google Sites.