Spying software out of line
Published 5:12 pm Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Spy vs. Spy, the long-running Mad Magazine comic, has gone cyber. Greedy Big Brother is spying on the very kids that Concerned Big Parents are spying on, er, monitoring, just for different reasons.
In unsurprising news, the Associated Press reported that a leading brand of software used to monitor childrens’ online activities allows the company to read what the kids are saying to each other and sell the marketing data that they gather to businesses seeking ways to tailor their advertising to kids.
Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. Because kids, of course, would never give their opinion if asked; the only way to get the truth is to read “over their shoulders.” And gosh, maybe, just maybe, it’s cheaper to gather data off spy software than to conduct professional polling of the children, preteens and teens that everyone and their grandmother covets and courts as the most lucrative consumer market, ever.
Other, non-spying brands of monitoring software are available. Five companies, including McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp,, told AP that they do not sell chat data to advertisers.
Notice they didn’t say they didn’t monitor the kids’ chats. They just said they do not sell data to advertisers. They might just use the information themselves.
EchoMetrix, which sells the Sentry and FamilySafe software, said it’s not putting kids’ information at risk, since the program doesn’t record chinames and addresses. Which misses the point entirely.
Parents, naturally, want to protect their children from all the porn, predators, sextors, etc., that populate the Internet, which is why such software exists in the first place. While parents have the right to spy on their kids, the company that sold them the software does not, even if they don’t exactly know the kid’s name, although of course they do.
“We never know the name of the kid — it’s bobby37 on the house computer,” said EchoMetrix CEO Jeff Greene.
The perverts online are scary, but the “consumerism trumps privacy” concept is more frightening. Don’t children have the right to chat privately, without the content being used for advertising purposes? Don’t teens have the right to talk without their slang being stolen and used in advertising aimed at them? Don’t they have the right to chat privately, period? Don’t they deserve to be paid for providing free “marketing data?”
What does bobby37 think? (Let’s not ask EchoMetrix.)
