Entries Tagged "children"

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Kids and Lying

How kids learn to lie. (Maybe it’s a bit off the security topic, but with all my reading on the psychology of security, I don’t think so.)

So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?

It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.

Posted on February 29, 2008 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Fear of Internet Predators Largely Unfounded

Does this really come as a surprise?

“There’s been some overreaction to the new technology, especially when it comes to the danger that strangers represent,” said Janis Wolak, a sociologist at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

“Actually, Internet-related sex crimes are a pretty small proportion of sex crimes that adolescents suffer,” Wolak added, based on three nationwide surveys conducted by the center.

[…]

In an article titled “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims,” which appears Tuesday in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, Wolak and co-researchers examined several fears that they concluded are myths:

  • Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

    Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. “The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours,” Wolak said.

  • Internet predators are pedophiles.

    Finding: Internet predators don’t hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak’s team determined from interviews with investigators.

  • Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.

    Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.

  • Internet predators trick or abduct their victims.

    Finding: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.

  • Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.

    Finding: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.

  • Online interactions with strangers are risky.

    Finding: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don’t know. What’s risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.

  • Internet predators go after any child.

    Finding: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.

In January, I said this:

…there isn’t really any problem with child predators—just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories—on MySpace. It’s just security theater against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cognitive bias that overestimates threats against our children, so it all makes sense.

EDITED TO ADD (3/7): A good essay.

Posted on February 26, 2008 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

MySpace and U.S. Attorneys General Agree to Fight Sexual Predators

MySpace has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states—Texas sat out—to protect children from sexual predators on the site.

The attorneys general are all congratulating themselves, as is MySpace—and there’s a lot of commentary out there. To me, this all seems like much ado about nothing.

The measures—details here—won’t do anything to stop child predators on MySpace. But, on the other hand, there isn’t really any problem with child predators—just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories—on MySpace. It’s just security theater against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cognitive bias that overestimates threats against our children, so it all makes sense.

Posted on January 17, 2008 at 1:12 PM • View Comments

UK's Privacy Chernobyl

I didn’t write about this story at first because we’ve seen it so many times before: a disk with lots of personal information is lost. Encryption is the simple and obvious solution, and that’s the end of it.

But the UK’s loss of 25 million child benefit records—including dates of birth, addresses, bank account information, and national insurance numbers—is turning into a privacy disaster, threatening to derail plans for a national ID card.

Why is it such a big deal? Certainly the scope: 40% of the British population. Also the data: bank account details; plus information about children. There’s already a larger debate on the issue of a database on kids that this feeds into. And it’s a demonstration of government incompetence (think Hurricane Katrina).

In any case, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized. The head of the Revenue and Customs office has resigned. More is certainly coming.

And this is an easy security problem to solve! Disk and file encryption software is cheap, easy to use, and effective.

Posted on November 26, 2007 at 1:15 PM • View Comments

Fraudulent Amber Alerts

Amber Alerts are general notifications in the first few hours after a child has been abducted. The idea is that if you get the word out quickly, you have a better chance of recovering the child.

There’s an interesting social dynamic here, though. If you issue too many of these, the public starts ignoring them. This is doubly true if the alerts turn out to be false.

That’s why two hoax Amber Alerts in September (one in Miami and the other in North Carolina) are a big deal. And it’s a disturbing trend. Here’s data from 2004:

Out of 233 Amber Alerts issued last year, at least 46 were made for children who were lost, had run away or were the subjects of hoaxes and misunderstandings, according to the Scripps Howard study, which used records from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Police also violated federal and state guidelines by issuing dozens of vague alerts with little information upon which the public can act. The study found that 23 alerts were issued last year even though police didn’t know the name of the child who supposedly had been abducted. Twenty-five alerts were issued without complete details about the suspect or a description of the vehicle used in the abduction.

Think of it as a denial-of-service attack against the real world.

Posted on October 5, 2007 at 11:00 AM • View Comments

Blowback from Banning Backpacks

A high school bans backpacks as a security measure. This also includes purses, which inconveniences girls who need to carry menstrual supplies. So now, girls who are carrying purses get asked by police: “Are you on your period?” The predictable uproar follows.

Maybe they should try transparent backpacks or bulletproof backpacks. (If only someone would invent a transparent bulletproof backpack. Then our children would finally be safe!)

Posted on October 3, 2007 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

Perceptions of Risk

Another article about risk perception, and why we worry about the wrong things:

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming “crisis” and the coming of bird flu.

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu—the boring kind—kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn’t want to hear that.

“I say, ‘You need a flu shot.’ You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, ‘Don’t talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?'”

Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn’t help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

Much of what’s written here I’ve said previously, and it echoes this article from Time Magazine (and also this great op-ed from the Los Angeles Times).

EDITED TO ADD (7/13): A great graphic.

Posted on August 22, 2007 at 1:43 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.