Child-safety software sells kids' IM conversations to market-research companies | Hacker News Reader

Child-safety software sells kids' IM conversations to market-research companies

google.com

64 pointsrms15 comments

"Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games."

If it can do that it can send back whole conversations as well, but the software company 'does not record childrens names or addresses' ??

They ought to be made an example of if this is true.

"In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms."

Heads should really roll over this one, they get you to pay to be able to sell your kids chat logs. It's absolutely disgusting.

Parents installing such software should take note that it is better to invest in educating your kids than it is to invest in software to police your kids.

If your children are old enough to be online unsupervised then you have to educate them to the point where they are capable of dealing with that responsibility without you or a digital sentry looking over their shoulder all the time.

It's all about trust.

I'm not condoning this company's actions but since it is almost certainly a completely automated process, how does this differ from, say, gmail reading kids' conversations to display ads? Should gmail be restricted from doing such for minors?

How about online communities like Habbo Hotel, et al? Because if they don't collect general marketing information from the activities within their pages, I'll eat my hat.

And how about if the software was free and marked as marketing-supported?

Just food for thought.

Totally and 100% different- we're talking algorithmic analysis versus actually honest to god selling the contents of your email.

OK, but how to develop the algorithms without some representative data? Google just matches ads with keywords, its not particularly clever with semantics - it just knows how often an ad gets clicked.

The company that sells the software insists it is not putting kids' information at risk, since the program does not record children's names or addresses.

Unless, y'know, one of those conversations happens to begin with "hi billy".

There is a special place in hell for these people.

Marketing hell shudder

Can anyone think of a dumber/more offensive thing done by marketers?

this one pissed a lot of people off, though i thought it was clever.

http://gothamist.com/2007/08/16/hangups_about_s.php

It's a good example of a different type of offensiveness. There is a definite difference between the offensiveness of a tasteless joke and something that strongly goes against our inbuilt desire to protect children. Also, it hanger ad seems inherently less dumb in that it was designed to generate controversy, because (most) attention is good attention. There is nothing good about the PR generated by the censorship company because there is nothing controversial about it; everyone thinks it is a bad idea.

But until then they will probably prosper, as no one ever seems to get sentences for leaking/loosing/selling private information.

I would hope that there are legal consequences...this is a huge breach of trust, and there are quite a few laws in place to protect children online from marketers and predators, and these people are both.

I would also hope that they have trouble sleeping at night...but I may be giving them too much credit.

Finally an answer to: "Who will think of the children?"

As shady as this seems, if consumers put up with it, companies will keep doing this sort of junk. Consumers are going to have to take a clear stand on privacy issues if we don't want to see this sort of thing get even worse.

Exactly what I was thinking - I bet 95% of their customers never even hear about this and furthermore, the activity is probably in their 30-page EULA so the parents agreed to it.

This kind of thing reminds me of that study which asserted that the COPA act would kill far more children via the targeted advertising for childrens' junk food it enabled than it would ever save from "online predators". Untended consequences ...

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