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Comment by gcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty annoyed that my kids' email accounts suddenly turned into a social networking site - there's a reason I don't let them have Facebook accounts.

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This is the first valid complaint I have read. Although I don't agree with your views, I do understand them, and I appreciate the fact that you didn't talk about problems which can be easily fixed by an off button.

Which of my views do you disagree with? Prior to yesterday, GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell. Now it's far too easy for that child to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire Internet.

I believe that instead of stopping one's kids from giving out personal information (unless they have a disorder- then it may be necessary), one should teach his or her children what is appropriate: to speak and to write => in public and in private- to family - to friends - to acquaintances - to strangers.

All of that should be taught. Show the child why things are bad rather than simply stopping them. If your child doesn't listen, then more extreme measures of censorship should come into play.

Keywords: "taught" "show" "listen" "learn"

Let's turn this around a little bit:

I believe that instead of automotive safety belts, we should all just teach people to drive slower and more cautiously. That we we are not encumbered by restrictive seat belts. Reasonable?

Takeaway: Take everything that you just said and then add parental controls on top of it because children really do need boundaries while they learn to think for themselves and hopefully make good decisions.

Yes. I am a parent.

=] Very interesting point; however, I must completely disagree.

In a car you are entrusting your life to other drivers, but in sharing information about yourself, you are entrusting yourself.

I'm trying to say "You have no control over others, but you have control over yourself" which is why I view your point as incorrect- yet interesting.

What you said is true, but children are not responsible fot themselves until they reach a certain age, the parent is responsible for them.

That kind of thinking is a great way to bring up children who remain irresponsible for their own behavior. Growing up I was responsible for everything I did, and now I'm quite tired of college classmates who still haven't learned to take accountability for basic things.

Yes but at 12 you may not be able to reason with your head, and if you do something you are not supposed to do, your parents will pay for it, so they're still responsible for you. It's the law (at least where I live).

That's very vague. Children may not be able to reason, that is true; however, I was taught to never talk to strangers, never leave with strangers, never take my favorite pokemon card from a stranger, never do anything I don't want to explain to the paramedics, never say something I wouldn't want to say to someone's face, never say naughty things. You get the idea. I never really went through a "swearing phase" either. Occasionally, I do swear, but I don't (and never did) drop f bombs every ten minutes like lots of people have. I never swore on Facebook because I wouldn't want people to read that. I never wrote a private conversation on someone's wall(public message board), through a message(email), or through an instant message- always did things like that in person. You will never see me do things like that, I mean- I might swear occasionally nowadays, but that's as bad ass as I get ;p (and it's usually for comic effect anyways).

To cover what I said: 1) I have remained in control of my "virtual" life my entire life. 2) I have never made a mistake of telling someone I don't know anything important about me 3) I believe if I can do it, others can too.

Something that can be very easy to forget until you concretize the question is that "children" is not a monolithic category.

I have no particular intention of locking down my 15-year old (in 13 years) with serious parental controls. But not all children are 15. Letting a 4-year-old run around loose on the Internet with no protection sounds like a bad idea to me. Which do you prefer, simply telling a 6-year-old "No internet access for you!", or drawing some boundaries but letting them roam within them freely?

"Someday, your children will need to be able to live without Mommy and Daddy saving them from everything!" is not an argument for throwing your 5-year-old out on the street.

Bull. You're trusting everyone on the internet to not abuse the information you gave out.

At best in this case, it's just everyone you know / email with. How many people you communicate with can be trusted online with all the information you give them? Most people use 2 or 3 passwords total! What if they lose control of their accounts? And when was the last time someone got in trouble for info they put on Facebook? Minutes ago? Seconds? The internet is arguably more dangerous than driving, though you're less likely to die, you instead just lose everything. I've had more viruses than car crashes (zero).

Then I'm afraid for your kids.

Any parent who equates on-line socializing with vehicle safety is clearly someone who needs a reality check.

Yes, I am a parent.

I see a key difference between driving cars and interacting on Internet, besides the nature of the dangers: it is important to know how to act on Internet without censorship, whereas I don't see the point of knowing how to drive without a seatbelt.

Now it can be discussed whether temporary censorship is a good pedagogic tool, which is the heart of the disagreement here, but the seatbelt analogy doesn't hold water.

I personally tend to believe into responsibiling rather than censorship, because:

- most censorships don't work well and get healthy kids to react against them; there's nothing worse than foolishly relying on a censorship that doesn't work.

- I tend to believe that when you trust people, they try very hard to be trustworthy.

- Our society is deresponsibilising everyone (it's the microwave vendor's fault if you're dumb enough to microwave your cat); giving a sane sense of responsibility to my kids is probably one of the best competitive edge I can give them in life.

- I'm ideologically libertarian when it comes to ideas, free speech and communications (not so much when it comes to economy, but that's off-topic)

> I tend to believe that when you trust people, they try very hard to be trustworthy.

Maybe "people" (individuals) do. Yet this trust is exactly what black-hats tap when they social engineer an email recipient into visiting a malware site.

So, should I make sure that my kids aren't black hat before trusting them? :)

The appropriate question here is: do you have kids? This should be an obligatory statement (similar to IANAL) when you publicly question the way someone else is raising their kids.

Most people who don't have kids (myself included) think they can still have valid opinions on child rearing. The more appropriate question to ask would be, "Have you tried this, and did it work?"

Until you have kids... most people who have kids think that your opinions aren't really valid.

I don't intend for that to sound mean. Sure, you can have your opinions, but there is so much that goes into raising a kid that you just can't know beforehand that you can't make an informed opinion. So, knowing if you have kids sets the level of expectations.

I think that it's fair to say that you can describe 'principles', but talking about putting those into practice is where people (such as myself), get touchy. This is especially true when you criticize someone else's choices.

Another way of putting it is this: In theory, there is no difference between theory in practice. In practice, there is.

While true, that there is a risk to expose personal information to the internet you probably should start to educate your kids in internet usage and not deny them.

You sentence "GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell" shows that you are still living in the 20th century. "As far as i can tell" means "i didn't ask them but i don't use facebook and email works, so it works for them too". Did you really ask your kids if their friends communicate over social networks?

You probably did miss it (too busy complaining and fearing?) but social networks are overtaking mail. You don't expect your kids to write their friends mail when everyone else is writing messages in facebook, do you? You will see, that your kids will get access to facebook/whatever anyway, if not only out of despite.

One of many sources: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popula...

I beg you: Start educating your kids soon, if you have concerns, but don't forbid them!

I see nothing wrong with allowing my kids to use social networking sites once I feel confident they're mature enough to accept the responsibility for managing their own privacy (and, in fact, my older child does already, although only on sites that allow pseudonyms for now). My observation is simply that use of email requires an entirely different understanding of privacy concerns than use of Twitter or Facebook, and that the default settings Google Buzz sets up are neither especially obvious (I had to hunt around for a while to figure out what was actually displayed to the public via Google Profile) nor what I would recommend for a minor.

Again: I have no problem with educating my children about the proper use of social networking sites. I simply don't appreciate being forced to do so by a service which they've been able to use without these sorts of concerns since they were old enough to read.

It's easy to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire internet using email. Claire Swire, Peter Chung, Trevor Luxton and countless others can vouch for this. The point-to-point nature of mail communication (and text messaging for that matter) gives an unfortunate illusion of privacy, yet publication and mass replication are only a couple of clicks away.

Posting on openly public sites such as Twitter and Facebook actually forces a lot more careful consideration up front. The sober reality is that you and your children should be treating the private emails you send in the same manner.

Unfortunately, posting on openly public sites doesn't force more careful consideration - only the poster can do that.

I've heard too many people opine that they don't care who sees their posts yet share really private information.

What happens when they get old enough to make such a decision for themselves and find themselves unprepared?

Education > protection.

(and this is from someone who was given extremely limited web access till the age of about 16 - and then promptly did some very silly things.... so take it from experience :))

I understand the complaint, but in this day and age, that's like being annoyed that your microwave and VCR have clocks. Everything is a social networking site now. I had to think for a minute in order to not include some form of profiles and user-to-user messaging in the last app I wrote.

I think it's just a generation gap, though—being younger, I grew up without any expectation of privacy from strangers, and I don't see anything wrong with that, really. I know that everyone else has just as many trite details floating around about them as I do, so there's no reason to single me out. It's like the sociological warfare of cars getting a steering-wheel-locking device/alarm/what have you, but in reverse: every person that removes their car's security is one more person reducing the probability that my car will be the one to get stolen.

That's fine until ten years from now someone really wants to make an ass out of you -- not your friends, not random people, but you -- and go on a digging spree.

That sort of security by obscurity only works until someone starts looking with a specific thing in mind.

It's not security by obscurity, it's security by honesty. You can't blackmail someone with something everyone already knows about them.

* Rips the clock out of the vcr. *, That was fun, great analogy, but how do the generational gaps get jumped? Intereestingly enough it's pretty easy for me to rip Buzz out of Gmail, its the constant "he doesn't get it" whispering that bugs people. Everyone tries to advertise to new users, but its hard to do without seeming unnecessary or even evil to so many. I had the same observation of twitter, but they weren't part of millions of users email. I think Google will get over the evil hump this time though, for now it looks like an inevitable backlash to how fast they are growing a user base.

Got them tightly under your control, do you?

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