Entries Tagged "children"

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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

School Uniforms to Enhance Security?

Look at the last line of this article, about an Ohio town considering mandatory school uniforms in lower grades:

For Edgewood, the primary motivation for adopting uniforms would be to enhance school security, York said.

What is he talking about? Does he think that school uniforms enhance security because it would be easier to spot non-uniform-wearing non-students in the school building and on the grounds? (Of course, non-students with uniforms would have an easier time sneaking in.) Or something else?

Or is security just an excuse for any random thing these days?

Posted on July 5, 2007 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Ubiquity of Communication

Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney’s ToonTown.

Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that’s inappropriate for children to hear.

Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called “Speedchat,” a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.

Users found ways to pass code strings to strangers anyway. This page describes several protocols, using gestures, canned sentences, or movement of objects in the game.

After you read the ways above to make secret friends, look here. Another way to make secret friends with toons you don’t know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends. This is how to do it! So, lets say you wanted to make secret friends with a toon named Lily. Your “pretend” secret friend code is 4yt 56s.

  • You: *Move frames around in house to form a 4.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the first letter down on a piece of paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around to form a y.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the second number down on paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around in house to form a t* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the third letter down on paper. “Okay.”
  • You: *Do nothing* “Okay” This shows that you have made a space.
  • Repeat process

Randy writes: “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”

Posted on June 20, 2007 at 12:48 PM • View Comments

Age Verification for Movie Trailers

Completely ridiculous:

It seems like “We want to protect children” really means, We want to give the appearance that we’ve made an effort to protect children. If they really wanted to protect children, they wouldn’t use the honor system as the sole safeguard standing between previews filled with sex and violence and Internet-savvy kids who can, in a matter of seconds, beat the impotent little system.

Posted on June 19, 2007 at 6:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.