John Palfrey’s research while affiliated with Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and other places

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Senate Subcommittee, and Commissioners of the United States Federal Trade Commission: Thank you for focusing attention on the important issues of youth privacy and safety online. As researchers, we welcome the opportunity to provide input into these hearings regarding the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We write as individuals, but we work together as the principal investigators of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The goal of our working group is to explore policy issues that fall into three substantive categories that emerge from youth media practices: 1) Risky Behaviors and Online Safety; 2) Privacy, Publicity, and Reputation; and 3) Information Dissemination, Youth-Created Content and Information Quality. Our work is intended to consider how research on the intersection of youth and technology can and should be used to inform policy. We seek to translate research from those who study youth media practices into terms responsive to the children’s privacy hearings.There is no doubt that protecting children’s privacy and safety is of utmost importance in our society. These issues are growing in importance with every passing year. We commend the authors of COPPA for being so deeply concerned about privacy and safety. As you consider the future of legislation and rule-making in this area, we urge you to consider the gap between the intentions of COPPA and how children and their parents perceive the implementation. It is this gap that we’d like to address in our submission. And it is our proposal that this Subcommittee consider how COPPA’s two P’s – of Privacy Protection – might be worked more effectively back into any revision of COPPA.

When it comes to youth and technology, issues of concern about the future – rather than issues related to opportunities – often dominate the public discourse. This is understandable. First, parents and grandparents are often baffled by, and sometimes concerned about, the habits of their children and the generations that follow – and this shift in behavior by many youth is surely no exception to that rule. Second, we are in the midst of radical transformations in the information technology environment and in patterns of usage of technology, changes that are bringing with them much creativity but also challenges to existing hierarchies. And third, adults perceive that their children are more likely to use these new information technologies in ways that are at best perplexing and at worst dangerous to themselves and to society. The data collected by social scientists about young people, how they use technologies, and the challenges and opportunities they face often are at odds with this public perception. We appreciate the frame of the FCC’s NOI, which encourages respondents to focus on the empowerment of parents as well as the protection of our children with respect to online behaviors.

In order to empower youth to create a kinder and braver world, we must begin by making sure that youth are safe. Youth are not safe when they are being bullied, harassed, or threatened. Thus, one of the first things that we must do to help youth be safe is combat the culture of meanness and cruelty that is at the root of bullying, peer violence, and abuse.Bullying is a systems problem and many well-intended people don’t realize the complexity of the issue. The following are research-driven elements of bullying that should ground any discussion of how to address this complex issue.

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influencing learning and teaching in ways previously unseen. Social media is transforming sectors outside education by changing patterns in personal, commercial, and cultural interaction. These changes offer a window into the future(s) of education, with new means of knowledge production and reception, and new roles for learners and teachers. Surveying the uses to which social media has been applied in these early years, we see a need to re-envision education for the coming decades. To date, no book has systematically and accessibly examined how the cultural and technological shift of social media is influencing educational practices. With this book, we aim to fill that gap. This book critically explores the future of education and online social media, convening leading scholars from the fields of education, law, communications, and cultural studies. We believe that this interdisciplinary edited volume will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to understand the opportunities for learning and education that exist at the intersection of social media and education. The book will examine educational institutions, access and participation, new literacies and competencies, cultural reproduction, international accreditation, intellectual property, privacy and protection, new business models, and technical architectures for digital education.

On January 17, 2009, a popular Saudi television sports program covered the day’s disappointing loss by the national soccer team to Oman in the Gulf Cup. The show’s host and his guests, including a professional soccer player and a former coach, are critiquing the team and its management when a call comes in from Saudi Prince Sultan bin Fahd, a key patron of the team. He is not happy with their analysis. On air, the prince dresses them down in turn, and goes so far as to tell one of them he is poorly raised, a serious insult in Saudi culture. The prince’s tone is disrespectful, and his words are not those of a leader to citizens, but of a ruler to his subjects. A clip of the tirade quickly appears on YouTube, and blogs and online forums post the link, spawning long chains of comments. These are overwhelmingly critical of the prince, who was seen as speaking to the commentators as though they were his slaves.

A Walk Through the Law Library In 2011 If one were to walk through the main reading room in the library at Harvard Law School on more or less any day during the school year, one would find most of the seats occupied by students. These students are arrayed, elbow to elbow, at long tables beneath a high, vaulted ceiling and the steady gaze of legal luminaries from the past (mostly white men, some in wigs). Though they are from many walks of life and are of varying ages, the students often have the very same objects in front of them. Some of these objects are what one would expect of young people of their generation, immersed in study. Coffee is ordinarily close at hand, primarily in school-approved, oversized mugs with tight lids to protect the library and its books from spillage; there is also a laptop computer, connected to the wireless network as an on-ramp to the Internet. But there is another common feature as well: an old-fashioned bound thick legal casebook. These casebooks look very much like what law books have looked like for more than a century. They are an enduring feature of the study of law – even in our increasingly digital age.

When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak's decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems completely in Egypt (see the photo).

Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook. Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.