
Child-safety software sells kids' IM conversations to market-research companies - rms
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i5CjgMEdrwRm3JxeglUykMAHAYmAD9AGNVM00
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jacquesm
"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.

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desu
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.

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

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gaius
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.

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dfranke
_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".

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SwellJoe
There is a special place in hell for these people.

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

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SwellJoe
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.

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

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TrevorJ
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.

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desu
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 ...

