Children's Privacy and Safety on the Internet:
A Resource Guide for Parents

Parents, teachers and other guardians cannot always be on hand to prevent children and youth from visiting web sites with harmful or objectionable content. Nor can they always be available to discuss with children what they are encountering in the online world.

The words "harmful" and "objectionable" can be interpreted in many ways. In the online world, they are often used to describe pornography, profanity, and hate speech. In this guide, we use these terms to also describe advertising messages and images that are highly manipulative of children.

The guide provides resources for parents to maximize the benefits of cyberspace for children and minimize the dangers. It is divided into six sections.

This guide covers a broad range of Internet privacy and safety topics. There are no easy answers to ensure your child has harm-free experiences on the Internet. Likewise, there are no truly effective technology-based solutions.

In the final analysis, there is no substitute for parental involvement in children's exploration of cyberspace. The best way to ensure that your children have positive online experiences is to spend time with them and ask them to show you their activities.

Here are the top tips for protecting children’s privacy and safety on the Internet. For additional tips, read the remainder of this guide, and get acquainted with the many other materials listed in Section 5, "online privacy and safety resources."

Privacy policy. Read the privacy policy statements on the web sites visited by your children. Teach older children to do the same. Look for policies that explain what information is collected, if any, what the web site operator does with it, and how you can choose whether or not the child’s information can be collected.

Consent. If your child is under age 13, you must decide if you are going to give permission for web sites to collect personal information from them, a requirement of federal law (see Section 2)Be sure to carefully read the privacy policy and terms of service before making this decision.

• Warn your children not to respond to messages that are threatening, suggestive, demeaning, or otherwise make you or the child uncomfortable. Tell them to report such messages to you.

• Set reasonable usage rules, including time limits, for your child's use of the computer. Watch for excessive use of online services late at night. That could be a tip-off there is a problem.

• Try to make online use a family activity. Keep the computer in a family room rather than the child's bedroom.

• Get to know your children's online "friends," much as you try to get to know their other friends. Never permit a child to arrange a face-to-face meeting with another computer user without your attending at least the first meeting.

• Explain that people online may not be who they seem to be. Someone claiming to be a 12-year old girl might be a 40-year old man.

• Also explain that not everything they read online may not be true. Any offer that's "too good to be true" probably is.

• Learn about the online services your child uses. Find out about ways to steer them to child-friendly sites. If you are a novice to online use, ask your child to show you what they do online and how to log on to online services. Better yet, take a class and learn to navigate the Internet yourself.

What are the privacy implications of children visiting commercial web sites?

Children are a highly marketed segment of the consumer population. Advertisers and marketers can use the Internet to target children and gather personal information from them for marketing purposes.

When children visit commercial web sites, they might be tempted to fill out surveys, exchange personal information for gifts, register for club membership, sign up to receive games, and give up personal information in chat rooms. After learning a child's name and favorite fictional hero, a company might send the child an e-mail message pretending to be from that "person." Younger children are not likely to realize the difference between fiction and reality.

Web sites can also be designed to invisibly gather information about children's interests as they "travel" from page to page, or site to site. Such transactional data is called the "clickstream." It often triggers the placement of "cookies" or "web bugs" on the computer used by the child, which in turn enable targeted ads to be displayed.

How have policymakers and consumer advocates responded to the issues of children's privacy on the Internet?

If you think a web site or online service is not complying with COPPA, file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission:

Is software available that will prevent my children from transmitting their personal information to web sites?

Yes, although it is not entirely effective. The primary purpose of "parental control" software, also known as filtering software, is to block objectionable content such as pornography. Several software programs can also be used to block the outgoing transmission of children's personally identifying information, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers. These programs can also block the use of online chat systems and instant messaging.

Parental control software packages include Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sitter, and Net Nanny. Be aware that children and youth who are skilled on the computer can "outsmart" filtering software by entering alternate spellings of names and addresses, numbers written out as words, and so on (for example, Kevven for Kevin).