Thursday, February 24, 2011

Targeting Children

It always seems just a little too obvious to me that the primary purpose of social networking and so called "free" internet services are not benefit the people who use them.

They are... plain and simple ...schemes for gathering personal information that can be sold for a profit.

Not that people would likely stop using them ... even if they knew the full extent of the information gathering and its subsequent dissemination most people would still continue to access the web sites of Google ... Yahoo.... YouTube .... Facebook and all the others .... because they do not really care.

It should be obvious to everyone who uses these applications and services that this is the case. In fact there is no reason that I can see for these folks to even hide the fact. Why the should not put their user information and disclaimers up front and why the get away with burying the information deep in the terms of service pages... which I find kind of humorous in the way they actually go to the trouble of using small type fonts in these web docs.
No reason at all for these feeble attempts to keep the real nature of their business out of plain site. Except that is ... because they are just a little be worried about blowback at some point.

This is all well and good when dealing with adults or people self identifying as adult but when it comes to kids there is a real problem.

You see ... children by definition are incapable of providing legal assent ... so by definition the information gathered from children is illegal.

Some people might just say Creepy ... (as Are We Lumberjacks? Roger does) .


I'm waiting for the blowback to kick in .....


OMMAG

Labels: , , ,

Link

1 Comments:

Blogger Lost Johnny said...

Let's face it. Today it is impossible to be an anonymous citizen in the developed world. Every time you make a purchase using your credit or debit card, retailers have a way of tracking your purchases, and targetting their marketting towards you. Ya have to admire the system, it's pretty ingenious. At least with social networking sites, you have the ability to limit the amount of information you share with the world. Good rule of thumb is if you don't want someone to know something about you, don't put it on the web. There is no such thing as secure.


And then there is RFID tags...and they are everywhere....

2/27/2011 7:21 p.m.  

Post a Comment

<< Home