Children of the Information Era

“Now you see it … Now You don't.”

Probably most people know, because so many web sites ask about it when you register, that there is special protection on the web for US children under the age of 13. Quoting the FTC's explainer page on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA"):

“COPPA imposes certain requirements on operators of websites or online services directed to children under 13 years of age, and on operators of other websites or online services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information online from a child under 13 years of age.”

So we in the US have a sort of right to privacy on the web. OK, not a right, exactly, but at least a strong law. But there's just one small hitch: it expires as we get older. What is that about?

Why should it be OK for that right to go away as we get older. Whose interest does that serve? Certainly not mine. What kind of values are encoded here? What message does that send?

I'm sure this was sold to Congress, and then to the American people, under the tried and true “for the children” banner and that lawmakers didn't stop to think very hard about how much many of us adults would have loved to have at least the option of similar protection.

But it was not to be.

Why?

Ethics and Technology

People like me who've watched and rewatched Star Trek for decades are regularly reminded, as one of its common themes, that technology and wisdom need to move hand in hand. When technology gets ahead of wisdom, bad things happen. But Star Trek mostly takes place in the 23^rd and 24^th centuries.

Ethics has had a very hard time in our 20^th and now 21^st century technological society. Really there's very little ethics built into anything technological. There's an explanation for that and it comes in two steps.

Early on, technologists anxious to explore a topic insist it would “hold back progress” to weigh them down with ethical concerns, as if the worst thing in the world would be having to think about the impact of technology on society.

Later, if you try to apply ethics to a more mature technology, the punch line of the joke on us is trotted out: It's too late. “It would be disruptive to the market” to impose ethics—now that the market is used to doing to us whatever it's doing that profits someone.

Growing Up in the Information Era

Of course there's another possible explanation for why this privacy “right” goes poof and vanishes at age 13: By that age we have “grown up.”

We'll ignore for the moment that 13 is not the ordinary line between childhood and adulthood. But probably some business somewhere stood to lose too much money if we drew the line between childhood and adulthood in the right place. Though I'm sure the official party line was that kids needed time to swim in the deep end while there were still adults around to help them. Or something like that.

I'm not buying any such sophistry, though.

After all, what is adulthood? Why do we even make a distinction in society between how we treat children and how we treat adults?

Wikipedia suggests this about adulthood:

“In contrast to a ‘minor’, a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible.”

Implicit in this is the notion that there are people—often but not necessarily parents, but usually at least other adults—training one for this role of independence, of self-sufficiency, of responsibility. And why? Well, because they've been around awhile. They're native guides familiar with how adulthood plays out. They can tell children what to watch out for because they've lived in the adult world for a whlie and have seen the pitfalls.

And that's the problem. This theory might work OK for learning to drive a car. Cars change a little each year, but mostly driving a car is the same today as it was decades ago, hopefully a little safer. Adults know what to teach kids about driving a car because they've done it awhile. They know the landscape.

But the information landscape is just different. You may give up a piece of information, like your location, and think it quite benign. It's never caused you a problem before. But there are people whose job it is to infer new information all the time from old information. That data is a treasure chest for companies to mine, so the implications of giving it away are not known to your parents. They maybe, if they're really paying attention, know what a given piece of information was used for in the past, but every day there are new things being inferred. Not just new ways to track us in the future, but new ways to understand data already obtained.

I'll say it this way to be most clear: There are no adults in the information society. There is no one who can take their lifetime, or even their last 20 years, and tell you what the next 20 years will feel like. Society has always changed from generation to generation, but it's happening faster and faster, to the point that we are really all just children, bumbling our way through the implications of the world that is being re-made before us. There are not a lot of adults with worked experience in the information age they can share with their children, not really. Not in the sense that there are adults who can help kids learn to cook dinner or play a piano or drive.

We are all children in the rapid-paced world of information that dominates today. There are effectively no adults who have lived this life before and are competent to prepare the next generation for that role. The informational life that any previous generation lived is a life that has already vanished by the time the next generation comes along.

The right to informational privacy should not expire as we grow up because there's no sense in which we can usefully reach “informational maturity” until we change the aspect of society in which we're willing to let technology far outpace wisdom, with ethics left far behind, lost in the dust.

Given that we are all really just children in this information era, adulthood not an easily attainable concept, we all deserve the protections that we today afford only to those under age 13. Our right to privacy should not suddenly expire.

Control at some point should pass from parent to child, but it should not just pass to the market. We should demand to hold it ourselves for our entire lifetime.

 

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