A blog turning into a game

Common Sense Media, a national advocacy group dedicated to the intersection of kids and the media, published an informative report that measures the Internet safety of popular social networking sites for kids.

The report measures sites across five dimensions: staff responsiveness, flagging features, privacy controls, age barriers, and content policy. Privacy controls is an interesting area from a product perspective; it is likely parents who are most concerned about how much personal information is revealed (directly or indirectly) by their kids. Even if proper privacy controls are put in place, unmonitored use of the Internet would render those controls useless. Similarly, with age barriers, kids can easily populate the birth date and “parent e-mail” fields with acceptable information so that they can complete registration, regardless of how old they actually are or if their parents were involved in the process. I’m not sure what more sites can really do to prevent misuse and adhere to COPA.

Sites that were examined include Club Penguin, Facebook, and MySpace. YouTube was included in the report as well, due to the large number of young people going to the site.

Common Sense Media is a terrific organization that does what it can to promote safe, but high-quality content for kids on the Internet. Keep up the good work!