The classic example is Ethan Allen.  Enter the term into Search and you’re out furniture shopping.

But all kids really want to know about Ethan Allen is that he was some great Revolutionary War figure from Vermont.

Wading through a cluster of furniture ads is confusing and takes away from the task at hand.  Other examples: Long John Silver, Madagascar (the movie or the place?)

If Google doesn’t want to create a student version they could simply make it one of the options–like Images, News, or Buzz.  A Student option would tailor searches more to academic terms and less towards advertising.

When the homework’s done you can just click back to regular ‘ole commercially funded Google.  School and homework should be given the importance of having a specific search engine optimized for learning not consuming.

Whaddaya say Goggle?  Introduce a study mode or run the risk of slim pickings for the next generation’s workforce.

]]> http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/26/why-google-needs-a-student-version/feed/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/23/should-google-be-doing-more-to-keep-us-safe/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/23/should-google-be-doing-more-to-keep-us-safe/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:26:37 +0000 admin http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/?p=747 I don’t know about you, but from my vantage point the signs of some virus/malware/bad guy troubles are everywhere. The first whiff came from a note sent by Avast!, a free (for basic protection) anti-virus program with a large user base.

The company cautioned that malware gangs have become adept users of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the science/art of trying to get certain listings to appear higher up on search results pages than others.  Since most people tend to click on one of the top of the list search terms, the higher your ranking on the page, the more likely it is you’ll be discovered.  Quicker discovery leads to increased traffic to your page.
Let’s say Dave Graveline’s newsletter is ranked higher on a search engine like Google than Dave Graveline’s Auto Repair site. The benefit to our Dave Graveline is that he gets more clicks because his page rank would be closer to the top of the heap.

Here’s one way that the wrong folks have been using SEO to their advantage. If Bill Clinton has a medical problem or Tiger Woods decides to offer his mea culpa, you can expect that people are going to search out further news.  Sophisticated malware gangs, savvy to the power of news, know that people will use Google as their main conduit to read more.  There are some variations on the theme: Some create fake destinations that ask for credentials, others have created websites that lead users to a fake message about having been infected with a virus. The message urges them to download new virus protection software in order to clean up things.  The anti-virus software is really a malware program in disguise.  In other words, Internet users just doing an ordinary search or reading online news cane be infected.

According to a note from Avast’s director of Anti-Virus Research, Jindrich Kubec: “This refined methodical approach to SEO manipulation and attack is increasingly popular and likely to keep working unless end users suddenly smarten up and change their willingness to visit unknown or questionable sites, or security firms can work more closely with Google.”

Interestingly page rankings are not just used by malware gangs, they’re used every day by major organizations like the Huffington Post too.  If Huffington notices an unusual spike in traffic to Taylor Swift’s website, they’re ready to fire up their addition to the story.  SEO has been a mixed bag of use and abuse.

What’s to be done?  After following the events of the past weeks I see two possible ways to alleviate some of the problem.  As consumers, don’t let Goggle do the driving.  If you want to see how Bill Clinton is faring with his new stent, then go directly to CNN, The New York Times, or your site of reckoning.  Not foolproof, but it diminishes the odds.  In other words, be proactive about where you go on the web and rely on Google less.

At the same time, Google should be making sure that page rankings have some credibility.  Working with worldwide anti-virus companies to alert them (all equally) regarding abuses and use issues is one of the critical steps in deterring attacks and malicious behavior.  Google has some education available for those interested in optimizing searches on their websites, but getting it to take a larger responsibility for its role as the keeper of page-rankers is a necessity, growing more immediate by the day.

Disclosure:  I spent a day as a guest of Avast’s corporate offices in Prague where some of these techniques were described.

Soon after, when it expanded to include high school students, it dropped the .edu address requirement. It wasn’t too hard for me to backdate my life and get myself a high school account. Today, everyone over 13 can have a Facebook account.

But, as the constituency grew, so did the capabilities and complexities.

Here’s an original Facebook page from 2004.  Notice the pervasive college feel.

Here’s my Facebook page from 2006. Clearly a database of my personal interests. 
Now, here’s today’s latest welcome to my page.

What you should notice: My new page has more icons per square inch than a Japanese schoolkid’s backpack.

First are the three icons on the upper left corner that call out: friend requests, messages, and notifications.  The shades of difference between a notification and a message are lost on me.  I was perfectly happy to check the right side of my screen for the occasional new friend and avoid this icon corner completely.

Number two. The left nav bar can now go on for miles.  It includes the new hallmark of Facebook: apps and marketplace. Not only can I have my own list of apps, I can see which apps my friends use. 

The marketplace is populated by ads and offerings from my friends, friends of friends, and people I’ve never heard of.  I get it. Facebook wants to be the CMU (Center of My Universe) but personally I’d rather see Facebook classic.

Finally, number three: some pretty good privacy. Once you get beyond brainteasers like this one from the privacy setting page: Story on your profile is now controlled by the privacy of the content itself, rather than an additional setting. For example, only people who can see both your Wall, and the Wall to which you posted would be able to see a story about you writing on a friend’s Wall. You cannot completely turn off recent activity stories anymore.   You’re offered a fabulously nuanced degree of control, but the exercise gives reading for meaning a new meaning.

Bottom line:  Like any six-year-old, Facebook is expanding its world, and starting to see things from the other person’s point of view (hence all the customization).  That’s great.  OTH, I miss the pristine neatness of my Facebook of yore.

Organizations like WiredSafety, FOSI, getNetWise, NetSmartz, Pause, Play Parents, and Common Sense Media are all committed to helping parents understand the dangers of the Internet, offering tips, advice, and survey data. Sometimes the messages are the same, sometimes not. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FCC are just a few of the government agencies that have their hands in the Internet safety pie, too. And the Internet safety industry has grown its own brand of celebrity: John Walsh, Parry Aftab, Donna Rice Hughes, and others who have been delivering the safety stump speech for over 20 years each.
For years, Internet safety messaging was based on fear. Fear of predators coercing children to meet them in the real world. Fear of adults soliciting our children for various forms of online sex. These issues have not gone away, but it turns out that while predatory problems are the headline makers, they are not the most frequent problems.

Today’s Internet problems are more nuanced and require a more nuanced approach to safety. The groups that “get it” are shifting away from the scare tactics and looking at ways to help kids protect themselves (often from themselves). Sexting, cyberbullying, and sharing of private information are the activities that are more likely to occur on a daily basis.

What will it take to bring Internet safety advocates into modern times?

1. Recognize the ubiquity of the Internet: We’re not just talking about protecting your PC any longer. Mobile phones, game machines, handheld devices, music services–these are all equal opportunities for predatory behavior.
2. Involve the hardware manufacturers: Fostering a culture of responsibility and awareness takes the efforts of all involved. Companies like Verizon, Disney, Microsoft, and AOL have all played a part in shaping the Internet safety environment. Conspicuously absent in the conversation are the hardware folks. Giving kids tools like smartphones, PCs, and netbooks demands that their makers have a stake in the process too.
3. Get the schools on the program: Recognizing that Internet skills are arguably the most important skills to cultivate for today’s students, schools should be doing much more to incorporate best practices. Computer ethics, codes of conduct, and other Internet behaviors should be part of the curriculum. Use of social networking and other popular technologies should be incorporated into academia so that kids can have good role models for how to use the technology.
4. Disclose funding and consolidate: When it comes to Internet safety we may have too much of a good thing. The sheer number of sites and bloggers devoted to keeping kids safe detracts from the message. A bit of consolidation would be beneficial. At minimum, sites should state where their funding comes from since funding sources can certainly affect the tone of a site.
5. Get kids involved in dialogue: Creating Internet savvy kids means including them in the conversation. Everyone knows that when kids learn from other kids, with humble opinion instead of dictum, the message is likely to create a deeper impression.
6. Be a role model: Parents who steal music and software, or are flippant about their own privacy and security on the web reinforce the notion that the web is the not subject to societal laws.
7. Create a national program: We ask kids to take a test to prove that they’re ready to get behind the wheel, and many states have implemented graduated licenses where you earn driving privileges (like driving at night) one at a time. Learning to navigate the Internet is at least as important as learning to drive a car, so maybe there’s something to be learned from the driver’s license model.

It’s the first of what I expect will be a generation of Internet safety products designed to spur a dialog rather than create a wall between kids and their parents.

When a child finds himself blocked from a website, or finished with her allotted minutes for the day, or wanting a new buddy added to his friend list, they’ll be able to ask the parents via an online request (or even, yes… in person). Parents will have the online tools to grant or deny their wishes. Hopefully, along with the granting or denying, comes dialog and transparency. The kids and their parents can discuss and openly see the rules of the house. The rules are easily modified to accommodate special situations. It’s easy to give a child access to a certain site, or grant permission to add that new friend or virtual world. It’s just as easy to take the privilege away if the privilege is abused. Best of all, because it can be accessed via any web browser anywhere, parents don’t need to be home to grant permission or see what the kids are up to.

I caught up with Marian Merritt*, Symantec’s Internet Safety Advocate and one of the key folks in designing this product. (If I were a kid I’d want someone like Marian as my mom because she thinks about the balance of a kid’s right to privacy versus a parent’s need to protect their brood in a sane, considered way.)

But Symantec is entering tricky waters as it tries to give both kids and parents a place to create the rules of the web.

Robin: You talked to lots of parents during the creation of OnlineFamily.Norton. What was the one thing you heard the most about parents’ unease with the Internet?

Marian: Parents want help in keeping their kids safe online, but they need it kept simple. Too often, parental control products overwhelm you with data, not insight. If you look at a typical parental control report, you get at least 15 entries for every website, because they list all the ads on the page or all the referral links to other sites. It becomes gobbledygook to me and most parents.

The other problem is that sometimes the programs get in the way of kids being kids. The filters are too severe and tend to block more than is necessary. Or the kids want to customize it and it becomes a negotiation with the parent who can’t do anything unless they are at home and on the computer. By the end of your workday, you might come home to a truly annoyed teen who was just trying to talk to their friends on Facebook.

Robin: Symantec decided to offer this product for free. That’s bold.  Why did they do it?

Marian: Two reasons—the first is that for this game-changing service to work best we need to get everyone into the game! The second reason is that in these tough economic times, it feels really great for Symantec/Norton to be able to give something of value to every single family in the U.S. and Canada for free.

Robin: What were a few of your major objectives/beliefs in designing this program?

Marian: We set out to design something that would bring families closer together, to allow parents and kids to collaborate on keeping the Internet fun and safe. That’s why we talk about setting rules as a team, not just something mom and dad impose on their kids. Also, we are big believers in regular, ongoing communication about how each family chooses to use the Internet and technology. You’ll find links to having “the talk” about Internet safety right in the product. At Symantec/Norton we talk about S.T.A.R. parenting as a way to keep the Internet fun and safe:

Software—everyone needs to install and use Internet security software and keep it updated
the Talk—regular communication about Internet activities within the family brings us closer and builds trust
Awareness—parents and kids alike need to stay informed about the latest Internet threats and how to defend yourself
Rules—agree as a family about how you’ll use computers and other forms of technology.

From the kids’ perspective, we often heard that it’s quite easy for a tech-savvy kid to defeat filters at home and at school. The most common way is to use a proxy site that allows kids to get to blocked websites through an intermediary site. OnlineFamily.Norton blocks those proxy sites by default. The other method kids use is to disable the filtering program, often by accessing the computer when the parents have stepped away for a moment. With OnlineFamily.Norton, we didn’t spend our time making it impossible to disable or uninstall the service. In fact, it’s easy to disable, but it’s always reported immediately to the parent’s account. Which means that if your son or daughter tries to turn off the family safety service, you get to engage in a meaningful conversation about your concerns about their Internet use.

Robin: You use OnlineFamily.Norton with your own family. Can you share an incident that shows how the program worked for you?

Marian: My teen-aged daughter will be a bit embarrassed, but one day her innocent search for YouTube videos featuring a new kids’ movie led her to a fake YouTube site with porn on it. When I checked her account activity, where I was monitoring but not blocking her web visits, I could see that she had entered innocent search terms, visited YouTube, but then clicked on a porn site link on that site. Sometimes people put links to related sites in the YouTube comments but those aren’t always appropriate or even remotely related. When I sat with her to discuss what had happened, she was relieved to see that I could tell her intentions were not to find porn but to watch the trailer for the new movie. She was embarrassed and upset at what she’d seen, but so happy I didn’t overreact. Together, we agreed to set the service to block such sites in the future.

Robin: OnlineFamily.Norton lets parents control who their kids talk to and where they go but parents need other protections like virus protection for their household.

Marian: Once you start using the OnlineFamily.Norton service, you’ll find great relief in seeing the sites your child visits, the search terms they use on Google, Ask, eBay, YouTube, and other sites, and who they IM with and what social networks they are using. You’ll still want to make sure the computer they use is safe from accidental downloads of malicious programs by using antivirus, spyware protection, firewall and intrusion protection. (Symantec/Norton makes these as well.)

For more on OnlineFamily.Norton read:

USA Today
PC Magazine
Download.com/CNET

*Disclosure: Symantec, Marian’s employer, is a sponsor at Kids@Play and I have consulted with them regarding the proper way to handle kids’ Internet safety.

Yesterday, in Washington, DC, and the Senate Building, Parry Aftab held the 9th Annual WiredSafety Summit. The event was hosted by WiredSafety’s Teenangels and Tweenangels—kids from all over the country who’ve taken training classes based on the WiredSafety curriculum.

Corporate sponsors included Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, KidZui, MyYearbook, Facebook, MySpace, and dozens of others. Corporations are particularly interested in working with and promoting WiredSafety kids because kids are the best touchstones for the state of the kids’ Internet. During the Summit, groups of kids tackle issues including gaming, texting, webcams, and social networking, and present their research to the adult audience.

Aftab also uses the Summit to bestow numerous awards for industry, government, and websites. I was honored by receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award for Online Child Protection, as was my colleague, Linda Criddle of Look Both Ways . Other awards went to the FTC for the work it’s done in creating websites that help you protect your privacy. Microsoft received an award for working on safer gaming environments, KidZui received an Internet Safety and Responsibility Award and awards were given to law enforcement programs as well as TV programs like Nickelodeon’s iCarly.

Some of the findings from the kids’ research with their peers included the following:

• Texting while driving is something that’s done quite a bit by teens and needs to be addressed, educating them about the dangers.
• They recommended that privacy policies on websites should be short and clear, and that information they give up on a site to register should not be shared with third parties.
• Password sharing is a common and unsafe behavior that teens and tweens often engage in (85% of elementary school kids share their password with at least one other person).
• There’s a shortage of interesting games for girls.
• Moms are gaming with their kids almost as much as dads.
• A 15-year-old is probably the highest risk age of the tween/teen population.
• When kids engage their parents with their online activities, the kids themselves are safer and more careful.
• Boys post more videos to YouTube than girls do, but both watch them as often.
• Cyberbullying occurs as early as 2nd grade and peaks in 4th grade.
• When kids are targeted by a cyberbully, most kids hide it from their parents (unless they surf together or play online games together).
• Boys tend to be riskier online than girls, by sharing more personal information and meeting offline with people they only know online.

The first generation of Internet safety products to help parents protect their kids from the dangers of cyberspace were all about saying “no.” This next generation is all about negotiation and conversation. And that’s a good thing, since what most kids need is education about the Internet and not a lockdown.

Today, Symantec launched Norton Online Family, a web-based service to help families facilitate the conversation that parents and kids should be having about the Internet. The site encourages kids to stay in touch and earn their parents’ trust by showing them that they can ask for permission and that they’re willing to live openly, not secretively, on the web.

So, for example, with Norton Online Family a parent can choose to be notified each time their child wants to add a new friend to their IM list. A parent can choose to monitor the child’s web usage, set time limits, or be notified when their child wants to visit a blocked site. Because of the built-in communications and alerts, this new generation of software promotes a discussion rather than a parental dictatorship.

Other Internet safety companies are also revising their approaches to reflect a more discursive approach to protecting kids on the Internet. We’ll be seeing more and more products that aim to protect through conversation and dialog rather than putting up blockades on the Internet.

Full disclosure: I serve on a Board of Advisors that was assembled to test the beta design of the product and offer feedback to Symantec.

Like cicadas, COPA comes back cyclically in the form of legislation that attempts to keep children safe from harmful material on the Internet. The Act loosely defines what is considered harmful to minors and then offers jail or fines as the consequences for those who would distribute these materials to minors for commercial purposes.

Noble in its intentions, the Act was a constitutional nightmare. Identifying minors based on the current “age-blind” way people surf the web is tough. So is legislating U.S. law when so much of the Internet is created offshore. As for whether there’s commercial intent—who knows in a Internet world, where just getting you to take a look at a web page is worth something to someone. Then there’s the old Lenny Bruce issue of what is harmful to minors. Who decides whether Lindsay Lohan on the six o’clock news is more or less harmful than Playboy?

These arguments have been debated for over a decade and it’s time to let them rest. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want kids to be protected online, but this Act is a morass of problems.

Let’s use the public library metaphor. Just because I want to keep my children safe doesn’t mean I need to be confined to the children’s library section with them. Similarly, it’s not the government’s job to create and enforce a PG-13 Internet. The government, as we’ve learned the hard way, should not be in the content rating business.

For the past eight years we’ve watched as the government took some extraordinary liberties in interpreting the balance between safety and personal choice. We’re starting to undo that damage now. In the same vein, the government should not be in the business of rating the Internet.

A Solution

The Court, in its ruling, suggested that technologies like parental controls and filtering are suitable alternatives to keeping children safe. I wouldn’t have agreed a few years ago, because the tools were so primitive that a parent needed to be way too tech-savvy. The newest crop of Internet safety tools are considerably more manageable and offer improved protection. In part, it’s because they’ve become more responsive to input and problems supplied by their own users. If you encounter a problem on the Internet and report it, you’ve delivered information that can alert others.

Next month, Symantec’s Norton Family Safety, a next-generation Internet safety control, lets parents and kids take joint custody of the Internet and have a dialogue about what they do and where they go. Today, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor offers up a quick safety check on websites.  Safe Eyes, a popular program, is one of the first to be able to block inappropriate videos from sites like YouTube. Recently the company also introduced parental controls for the iPhone. A new company called Dolphin Secure is about to launch a website where access comes only after you’ve used a biometric fingerprint scanner that assigns you a unique and verifiable ID.

In an administration where high tech is back in vogue, technology and good parenting trump legislation.