Perspective: Are you watching what your kids post?

You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

This sage advice has served young people well over the centuries, but it is taking on new meaning in the Internet era. Kids and teens who eagerly post personal information and thoughts on various blogging and social-networking sites are leaving a digital trail that can have serious implications for their futures.

Much of the recent discussion about teens and blogging has focused on dangers from predators, or on constitutional rights and free speech. There has been a rash of school suspensions and arrests for Web postings used by junior high and high-school students to defame others or paint wild pictures of themselves. Boasts about drug dealing have even led to actual drug busts

The content itself--despite whether the courts eventually decide that it is entitled to constitutional protection--can ultimately limit our children's opportunities. After all, the easiest way to check people out these days is to hop online and do a few searches.

We are still quite naive as a digital culture, and young people are finding out that what you put up on the Web can still be following you around 10 years later.

Kids who get mad at a teacher and rashly publish a scathing and obscene lampoon on a site like MySpace.com aren't thinking that it could prevent them years hence from getting a scholarship to college or obtaining a job they really want. But this can and has happened. One recent law school graduate was shocked to lose out on a prestigious clerking job for a judge when a routine background check turned up something the candidate had thoughtlessly published years before.

We are still quite naive as a digital culture, and young people are finding out that what you put up on the Web can still be following you around 10 years later. Private conversations that used to take place among kids in homes or malt shops are now being recorded for posterity, despite whether the kids realize it. And even good kids may occasionally share comments that will cause them problems down the road.

The Internet seems very ethereal and transient, but the brick-and-mortar world pales by comparison, when it comes to storing and disseminating information. That is what computer networks were designed to do. Once you air your dirty digital laundry on the public Internet, you can't take it down and fold it and put it away. It is out there forever, accessible by search engines and completely beyond your control.

Concerned groups are lobbying for new laws that restrict what children can access and what they can say on the Internet. However, such legislation may well fail to pass constitutional muster, and industrious kids could probably figure a way around it even if it did.

One of the harsh realities of cyberspace is that free speech can be a very loose and very big cannon when wielded by teens and tweens. Research shows that the part of the brain that controls impulses and mitigates against rash behavior isn't fully developed until well into young adulthood. It is very good to educate kids about digital trails and the effect they can have later on, but it won't change this biological fact.

As adults, we have to be responsible for our words and actions, but as parents, we need to protect our children from themselves and their impulses. We provide safe places in the physical world for our kids to congregate and interact, and we need to do no less in the virtual world. On the public Internet, danger is always only a few clicks away.

Whether we are worried about pedophiles and cyberbullies, or about self-authored content that could brand our children forever, the answer is the same: We need a compelling and yet protected environment in which kids can create and share content.

We must come up with a closed ecosystem in which our kids can safely flex their digital muscles and develop the skill sets they will need in the Internet age. And we must think of the long-term implications if we continue to leave them to their own devices.

Biography
Tim Donovan is vice president of marketing at Industrious Kid, an Internet company dedicated to developing kid-friendly and parent-approved online products, services and destinations.

More Perspectives

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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.

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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?

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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.