There have been some developments and some recommendations in the EU. I'm not up to date enough on that to know where they are in that process. They did a huge study in the EU, which ended recently. Academics and a number of government agencies studied these types of issues with kids of various ages online in something called the EU Kids Online project. After the reports came out, I know that discussions started about industry guidelines and implementing new guidelines and implementing potential regulations. Where they are in that process, I'm not entirely sure, but that would be one place to look. I know they have been considering it, and they've also grounded a lot of what they've been doing in research, which is great.
In terms of examples of children being specifically targeted and used for commercial gain, one of the big problems of studying this area and these processes is that there's a lack of transparency. Data is collected and you can read the terms of service and you kind of see the data coming out in different places, but it's not always clear what the links are and how data is being transferred and how it's being used. The examples I've looked at to see how this process can work tend to be sites that actually sell the data to other companies and that are quite open about selling the data to other companies. They function as a social media space, but they also do data-mining and data-brokering in-house.
An example from a few years ago was that of Neopets, which is an online community for kids. They sold the market research they had done to various different companies and had an annual report in AdAge, which is a big advertising industry trade publication in the U.S. They would include surveys and pretty easy-to-identify market research strategies within the site.
A more recent example is Habbo Hotel, which is based out of Finland but is popular all around the world. Most of the people who use it are between the ages, I think, of 13 and 18, but they do have a significant number of users who are 11 to 13, as well. They offer a similar type of service, called Habbel, through which they package data and sell it to other companies. Through that service, companies can also hire them in advance to sort of spy on conversations that kids might be having about a particular product, and tell them not just what the kids are saying about the product but the larger context within which that conversation emerges—what kinds of likes those kids have, what areas of the site they are gravitating towards, what other things they talk about, what time of day they are there, where they plan to go after if they plan to meet up in real life, because a lot of kids who meet and communicate in social media actually do know each other in real life and go to the same schools and that kind of thing. It can be very detailed information.
The only reason we know how detailed they are and we know about these kinds of processes is that they're openly selling the data. But in many cases they're not selling the data. They're keeping it or they're selling it through more covert means, so it's not as obvious what's happening to it.
Are kids concerned about privacy? Definitely. There's been a lot of talk about the different concepts of privacy that kids have. I think this comes back to Mr. Andrews' comment earlier about kids being born in this age of Facebook, and not knowing any different type of environment and having pictures of themselves online before they're even old enough to go online themselves.
They may have slightly different concepts of privacy, but a lot of them are very similar to traditional concepts of privacy. In study after study, what comes out the most is that they're most concerned with privacy infringements that impact them on an immediate level: friends infringing on their privacy or parents infringing on their privacy or perceiving that their parent is infringing on their privacy. These abstract forms are at a length. They doesn't seem to impact them on that day-to-day basis. They are dealing with these privacy issues in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate. They might not seem as concerned about these things, but oftentimes they just don't really understand how they're going to impact them and where. Frankly, because so many of us also don't understand how those types of privacy infringements are impacting us and where, we're worried about what might happen, but we're not completely seeing the consequences yet. It's more difficult to find out how they feel about that.
There is a new study of Canadian children and youth that has come out just recently and has explored these issues. Increasingly, kids are even able to articulate these concerns about abstract privacy infringement, which I think is a really important development. They're learning about it more, they're experiencing it more, and they're able to communicate more about how it makes them feel and whether they feel their rights are infringed.
The sad thing is that I'm not sure if they feel there's an escape, a solution, or an alternative. There certainly isn't one being presented to them right now.