Comments on: Are you watching what your kids post?

Tim Donovan of Industrious Kid cautions that digital trails can come back to haunt your children.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Actually it's the companies that need to change

The companies need to look at the timeframe of the postings they're looking at, current timeframes indicate one thing but old timeframes simply show a position that may no longer be true.

Of course companies that reject people for old postings may be cutting their own throats as those rejected may also be some of the more articulate and intelligent kind of people they actually want.

[TMB333]

Limit What Can Be Used By Employers

Just as there can be no discrimination by sex, race, or religion, there should be a law that doesn't discriminate against what one says as a child. If someone recorded what I said when I was 10, about me wanting to 'rob a bank' like I saw in some movie, should I be held responsible for that statement when applying for a Bank Manager's job when I'm older? Come on! Has the world gone insane??

The information that is published by a child will usually have a time stamp on it, and anything that is posted by a person when they are younger than 16 years should be treated as the ramblings of a minor and cannot be used against them in their adult life.

I find it difficult to believe that a person can lose a job over something that they posted in the past. The first question that comes to mind is how was it proven that the poster was the actual person in question? I can create an account on many sites under someone else's name and write anything I want about anything. Does that automatically make the 'someone else' responsible?

I would also suggest that parents teach their kids the power of anonymity on the Internet. Let their kids choose a favorite nickname or superhero or something, and tell them that they should always use that name whenever they are posting something or logging into a site. There are very few sites that require a person's actual name when they are registering to post to, so why volunteer information about yourself when you're not required to?

[ajbright]

Data retention law

It really doesn't matter whether you try to watch your kid 24/7, explain to them the problems or dangers of posting wild boasts (which are usually completely untrue), kids don't really care and have no concept of the consequences to careers or legal issues because of something they post - in what they believe is a private conversation with friends.

The simple way to combat this sort of discrimination against kids being kids, is to make data retention laws that will not only benefit them, but the rest of us too.

Make it illegal to retain non-tax related data for more than 12 months, i.e. everything must be wiped.

No online photo storage, no online permanent email storage, all of it must be destroyed without trace.

You may cry out and say that you rely on your hotmail inbox or the ability to push your most personal photos to kodak's online database, but even these things can seriously come back to bite you in the event of legal problems.

It is not worth the capture of a handful of criminals if millions of kids' futures are wiped out through boastful and niaive posts.

A watered down provision could make it illegal to permanently store anything from anyone under the age of 18, but this would not protect against the abuse of credit card data or other personal information that's flowing freely into eastern Europe and Asia.

At any given moment 400 British credit card numbers, complete with names, address, mother's maiden names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth, etc are for sale online. The number of US card numbers is probably many times greater.

This is because credit card transaction providers are not being held legally accountable for not obeying the very rules Mastercard and Visa would have them abide by.

Most online identity theft (admittedly a small number compared to dumpster divers and social engineering) occurs because data is held behind weak passwords or on incorrectly configured servers.

Then we have the governments of the US and Europe attempting to make holding personal data a legal obligation, in order to make the job of monitoring their populations easier - using the big bad terrorism word to convince us it's necessary.

The reality is that along with removing our civil rights, they are abandoning the prime job of government, which is to protect their own citizens.

Their databases will be about as well protected as your average small business, which is to say, not protected at all, and our information will be freely traded by terrorists, organised crime and big business trying to sell you prescription drugs or magazine subscriptions.

The benefit to you will be zero, unless you consider being held at customs because their errorproof biometric systems have accidentally put you in the wrong database, a benefit.

At the moment 28,000 US Citizens with no links to terrorism whatsoever have been placed on the no-fly list - and homeland security won't remove those names because they don't believe they have to. Each one of those people, including the ones with letters from the DHS saying they aren't terrorists, are prevented from boarding planes on time because their names have been keyed into the wrong database.