At School And At Home, How Much Does The Internet Know About Kids?
Children's personal information isn't supposed to be an online commodity. But whether kids are using Google apps at school or Internet-connected toys at home, they're generating a stream of data about themselves. And some advocates say that information can be collected too easily and sometimes, protected too poorly.
Last month, a hacker stole personal information and photos of more than six million children after breaking into the computer records of a educational toy company, VTech.
VTech says that they've since hired a security company to deal with the breach. That might not be enough to convince Congress — Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) sent a letter to VTech, wanting to know if the company is complying with a law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The issue, of course, spans beyond VTech. In the toy world, there's the new Internet-connected Barbie doll, which has also been found to have security flaws, for example. And privacy advocates have long waged a battle against cookies and other data collection based on kids' Internet activity.
Google is one of the companies that have come under fire. A nonprofit advocacy group called Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Google's data mining practices. More than half of classroom computers in the U.S. are Chromebooks and many students and teachers are using Google Apps For Education, a group of tools that include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and the purpose-built Google Classroom.
Anya Kamenetz of NPR's Ed Team and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a staff writer for the tech news website Motherboard who has reported on the VTech data hack, spoke to All Things Considered about the issue of children's privacy. Here are a few At School And At Home, How Much Does The Internet Know About Kids? : All Tech Considered : NPR:
