Archive for August, 2009
Booster Seat Safety and the Britax Parkway SG
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 I’m at the point where I started wondering when it was appropriate and safe to graduate my 3 1/2 year old to a booster seat. Turns out, not yet. I started to think about it because it’s become increasingly difficult for him to climb in an out of the Britax Advocate he’s using. While I’m [...] Related posts:- New Study Says Booster Seats May Be Unsafe
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Your SIGG Bottle May Contain BPA
Friday, August 28th, 2009 It’s come to light that some older models of SIGG reusable aluminum water bottles contain BPA in the epoxy lining inside the bottle. As you may already know, the lining on the interior of SIGG’s has been questioned for some time and many skeptics thought that the epoxy may contain BPA… turns out they were [...] Related posts:
Re-Useable Produce Bags: We love Carebags!
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 A SafeMama reader actually wrote in to us about CareBags a while ago. We as eco-conscious shoppers go through the trouble to bring our own bags to the grocery store but then get to the produce aisle and are faced with plastic produce bags. I was just skipping them but to be honest I hated having [...] Related posts:
Have Ingredient Questions? Stephanie Has Answers
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 If you’ve been reading here long enough, you know that we never shut up about Bubble and Bee, or Stephanie. We love that woman for so many reasons. One is her lengthy knowledge of chemicals. I never hesitate to bug her when I have a question about an ingredient. She’s even guest posted for us [...] Related posts:- Guest Post: Stephanie of Bubble & Bee Tells Us About Dimethicone
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Facebook lawsuit ‘a jumbled mess’
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009While I can’t comment on the entire suit, it’s clear to me that parts of the just-filed privacy lawsuit against Facebook represent a lack of understanding of how social networks like Facebook work as well as how best to protect children and adults on the Internet. I’m especially baffled by the allegation that Facebook violated the rights of an 11-year-old child because he disclosed that he had swine flu.
The suit, brought by five plaintiffs in Southern California, alleges that Facebook violates California privacy laws.
The child who said he had swine flu is identified as “Xavier O.” The complaint says he “has a Facebook account that was opened without the knowledge or consent of his parents.” He allegedly “uploaded personal information, videos and photographs, including swimming and/or partially clothed photographs of children ages 5 to 11.” It further says that he posted information that he had swine flu and asked people to “Please pray for me…God Bless.” The complaint says that “upon learning of the Facebook account and the posting of an uncertain medical condition,” the child’s parents “removed the medical condition postings from Facebook” and that “Xavier O. and his parents have been unable to learn where the minor’s medical information may have been stored, disseminated or sold by Facebook.”
(Disclosure: I’m co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit organization that receives financial support from Facebook as well as other companies.)
I don’t know where to begin parsing young Xavier’s case. First, by simply having a Facebook account he was violating Facebook’s terms of service. And why did his parents only remove “the minor’s medical information?” They should have deleted his entire account.
Like all reputable social networking sites, Facebook complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by not allowing children under 13 to have accounts (COPPA does make provisions for accounts for children under 13 but imposes certain conditions including parental consent). The only way for this young man to obtain a Facebook account would be to lie about his date of birth.
Facebook makes reasonable efforts to remove accounts of children where there is evidence they are under 13, but it’s not possible to catch every violator of these terms and its attempts to validate the ages of members are consistent with industry practices. While it could be argued that they should be using some type of age-verification technology, an exhaustive investigation of those technologies by the Harvard Berkman Center led Internet Safety Technology Task Force (of which I was a member) determined that such technologies, at the current time, are neither effective nor necessarily desirable.
Once on Facebook, anything a person posts can, by default, be seen only by his friends or people in his network. If Xavier’s profile was available to additional people, it was because he changed his default privacy settings. But, even if he hadn’t, there is always the possibility that a friend or anyone with access to his profile could copy any text or images posted and disseminate them. So of course it’s possible that such information could have been stored, or disseminated. In an e-mail interview, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said, “There are no circumstances under which we would have sold that information.” He further points out that the plaintiffs in the suit “make many assertions about mining data and selling it, but never say who is buying.”
What I find very strange is the statement that the 11-year-old had posted “swimming and/or partially clothed photographs of children ages 5 to 11.” Could they be implying he was posting child pornography images? If so (and I doubt it), this kid could find himself in juvenile court.
Another strange allegation comes from a college student who joined Facebook in 2005 back when it was for college students only. Somehow she is shocked that Facebook is now open to anyone–a change that Facebook made with great fanfare in 2006. If she’s so unhappy about the change, why doesn’t she just close her account?
Santa Clara University Law Professor Eric Goldman told me that he considers the complaint to be “a jumbled mess.” “There is a style of complaint that lists every single possible gripe you have with a company,” he said. “This one listed all sorts of random gripes about Facebook including insignificant items like their acquisition of FriendFeed.” He added, “lawyers sometimes do that, hoping that if you throw those against the wall, the judge will find something that sticks.”
Review: Spa Baby Bathing Tub
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 With my new addition to the family I’ve been reconsidering a lot of things I used the first time around, including our baby tub. I had a basic blue baby tub with the infant sling attachment and my son always screamed through baths as a little baby. Only did he start liking being bathed when I [...] Related posts:- Book Review and Giveaway! The Baby Gizmo Buying Guide
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Should sex offenders be banned from social networking sites?
Thursday, August 13th, 2009By Larry Magid
The just-signed Illinois law banning sex offenders from social-networking sites might seem like a good idea to protect children, but it will have virtually no impact on their safety and could wind up making things worse.
The law, which was signed Thursday by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, would prevent registered sex offenders in Illinois from using a social-networking service defined as an “Internet Web site containing profile Web pages…that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs…or any other personal or personally identifying information.”
The definition also includes “the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile Web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile Web page,” which might be interpreted to include news sites, including CNET News, that allow visitors to register and leave comments.
But let’s start with the problem the law is trying to solve. It’s aimed at adults who troll the Web in search of children to sexually exploit. While such people do exist, they are rarely successful in harming youth whom they meet through the Internet. Every peer-reviewed study conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center and other scholarly organizations, as well as the report of Internet Safety Technical Task Force, has concluded that the risk of online predators is greatly exaggerated.
I’m not aware of any cases of a predator harming a prepubescent child whom he met on the Internet, and there are very few publicly known cases of sexual contact between a teenager and an adult they met online. In those few cases where contact has occurred, it is often because the teenager was aggressively seeking the contact and where the teen was also engaged in offline risky behavior. These cases are typically between a teenage girl and young adult male between 18 and 25.
Law enforcement officials and politicians will point to plenty of Internet predator cases, but the overwhelming majority are either sting operations, in which no child was harmed, or child pornography cases which, while horrendous, are not addressed by this law.
A January 2009 analysis of Pennsylvania cases by the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use found, during a four-year period, that “only eight incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship,” compared to 9,934 children who were sexually abused in a single year in that state.
If the law had no negative consequences, I would give it a pass. After all, who cares about the rights of people who have been convicted of sex offenses? Well, I do. Not because I think they’re wonderful people but because it’s in all of our interest that, if they’re not in prison, they be integrated into society to the extent that they can function and be able to find and hold appropriate jobs. Keeping these individuals away from the very types of sites that can help them in their careers is counterproductive to the goal of rehabilitating them.
The other issue is how we classify sex offenders. Not everyone on every state sex offender list is a danger to children. A recent article in The Economist, entitled “Unjust and Ineffective, observes that “Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely.”
Citing a report from Human Rights Watch, the article says “at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of those states, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.”
The article describes the plight of a young woman who, in 1996 at age 17, was charged with having oral sex with a 16-year-old boy. She was given jail time and probation, and wound up on a sex offender list. Should she be banned from having a Facebook account or the ability to publicly comment on posts like this one? I think not.
I’ll leave it up to others to debate our sex offender registry policy. Adam Thierer and Robin Sax have just written thoughtful responses to The Economist’s article, taking differing points of view, but I do think that we need to be careful about not indiscriminately shutting down social-networking access to all registered sex offenders. Some probably yes, but not every one of them.
Another reason to question this law is that it can lead to more than one false sense of security. To begin with, the most dangerous sex offenders aren’t necessarily the ones who are registered but the many who haven’t yet been caught and convicted. And if we focus exclusively on predation, we’re likely to lose track of the most dangerous aspects of youth online behavior, which are mostly either kid on kid–such as bullying, harassment, and impersonation–or self-imposed risks such as sexting or posting information that could be embarrassing later in life.
Anne Collier has more on this in NetFamily News.
SafeMama Diaper Rash Cheat Sheet
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 Welcome to the SafeMama Diaper Rash Cheat Sheet! We got this request a dozen times so here we go. One of the inevitable things about having kids, is diaper rash. I’ve been lucky so far with my son never really getting diaper rash, though he’s had his fair share of weird patches, oozing eczema on [...] Related posts:- SafeMama’s 2009 Safer Sunscreen Cheat Sheet
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Hello world!
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Review: Fresh Organics
Monday, August 10th, 2009 We were lucky to get a preview of the new product called Fresh Organics for baby. Fresh Organics has quite a line of products for adults, that are all natural. And I’m always a sucker for a new baby product. The shampoo conditioner combo lathers nicely and has a very subtle smell to it, which I [...] Related posts:- Product Review Series: Erba Organics
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