The government has passed some laws which are intended to protect children on the internet. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) are to give protection for children who are accessing the internet. There are requirements and protective information for both COPPA and CIPA. Both acts are similar and different in ways to protect children but needed to be done with two acts. There are challenging elements with the COPPA and CIPA to implement in order to be compliant with the acts. There are reasons for the acts to define protection for different age groups such as COPPA defines a child under 13 and CIPA is under 17. When COPPA and CIPA was made into law, there were people who were for the acts but there were also people who opposed the acts.
COPPA purpose is to protect the privacy of children on the internet. The websites on the internet can only collect certain information from children and need to have parents’ consent. The main requirement for COPPA is to get consent from the parents to collect information and the second is the creation and posting of the privacy policy. A website has to have consent from the parents to be able to use any information collected from a child. According to Grama (2011), web site operators who get information from children must get consent from the parents before collecting, using or disclosing information, (p.124). Getting the consent can be challenging in that the web site operator needs to make sure it is the parent, not someone claiming to be the parent of the child. The web site would have to use technology which can help prove it is the child parent and not the child or someone else claiming to be the parent. The web site also has to c...
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...o protect children from offensive material and threats from online, congressmen making the laws will have to be careful not to violate the rights of the people.
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Grama, A. (2011). Legal issues in information security. (p. 124).
Burlington, MA: Jones & Barlett Learning.
Jaeger, P. I., & Zheng, Y. (2009). One Law with Two Outcomes: Comparing the Implementation of CIPA in Public Libraries and Schools. Information Technology & Libraries, 28(1), 6-14.
Kim, D. & Solomon, M. (2012). Fundamentals of information systems security. (p. 460).
Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
McCarthy, M. (2005). THE CONTINUING SAGA OF INTERNET CENSORSHIP: THE CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, (2), 83-101.
The expansion of the Internet infrastructure across the world, has brought an increased audience. Which has provided expanded markets for businesses and exploited new opportunities. There are virtually countless social sites and media used by individuals to access and share experiences , content, insights, and perspectives. Parents today tend to believe they should spy on their kids online activity. I argue parents should respect the privacy of a child's social life and his/her internet activity.
Lily Huang author of Protect the Willfully Ignorant states “An increasingly urgent question of privacy or how best to keep your public plot walled in” (474). Most internet users savvy or not, are aware of the potential risks. Most people know the potential risk for permanency and of the pictures or information we put out on social networks or other sites and the content being seen. We have all heard the warnings since grammar school from everyone about the internet and how to use it. Teachers, parents, librarians and school inundate our children all throughout school about information on safe usage. To be aware of predators and such is common knowledge. Why the need for laws to protect childrens’ privacy, and usage against exploitation? Similar reasons to why we wear seatbelts while driving and it is enforced by law. We all want our freedoms not to be infringed but at what cost and to who? We are aware of the statistics and outcomes of auto accidents without seatbelts and the need “to protect the willfully ignorant” (Huang). Lily Huang discussed consumer’s lack of expertise for making the best privacy decisions and how important default privacy settings are on social networks (475).
Imagine a place where you have access to anything and everything one could want. Some would say that is only existent in a utopia, and some would say that describes the Internet. Many adults go on to the net and access pornographic material that would be unsuitable for children. This is called cyberporn. The controversy lies in the fact that children are accessing these materials also. Government, activist groups, and concerned parents are fighting to regulate obscene material found over the Internet to protect children. The first amendment is the only thing protecting adults from losing their rights to obtain pornographic or indecent material on the net. Under the first amendment the government must not regulate cyberporn. Online sex has been around since the first bulletin boards were available over the computer in the early 1980's. People would pay to down load pornographic pictures and talk dirty to each other. Usenet groups took control of porn after the Internet came about. They did not charge people to down load picture and to interact with others. In result, Internet porn grew (Rosen 16). Things have changed drastically since then with over a million different sites available to access porn. Now it is not just for adults. Children are accessing the obscene materials. This brings rise to issues of how to protect them from problems that can arise. The materials they view, could influence children. They could also be subjected to cybersex in a chat room full of people that could be three times their age. Worst of all pedophilias could influence children to meet with them outside of the computer. The government and the United States citizens must now figure out how to protect our children from the effects of cyberporn, and y...
This paper will also look at how the ECPA affects society, focusing on three cases. One case involves the United States Navy and an enlisted solider. The solider was threatened to be discharged for information he had in his America Online (AOL) user profile. By going in-depth on how the law pertained to this case, and how the ECPA was applied, the reader will have an understanding on how this law works. Another case will involve the ECPA in a diff...
...have jurisdiction on what can and can’t be said. Most of the things that will be censored are the hackers, crackers, trolls, and bullies; not the regular people voicing their opinions. While many of these points are important, they can be easily solved without affecting the common good. If your child doesn’t listen to what he can or can’t surf on the internet. It’s up to the parents to take away their child’s internet privilege. Same with reading indecency post of other users. No one forced them to read it, if they don’t like the content of the website, then stop visiting it or ignore the comments of others. Also if developers don’t want their product to be pirated, then they should create more security measures for their product. The common good shouldn’t be punished because people are too lazy, or weak to implement problem solving skills to assess their problems.
Tears begin to fall down a child’s face. Her body goes into shock out of fear. Her mother warned her about watching inappropriate content, and there it was, right on her computer screen. This could not have happened though. All she was doing was casually browsing the internet before a pop-up appeared. Although it may seem hard to believe, the major cause of events such as this is the lack of censorship on the internet. Internet censorship relates to the removal of offensive, inappropriate, or controversial content published online. The current problem with the internet is that there are few restrictions on what can be published or viewed. Several sites on the internet only offer a warning about inappropriate content that can easily be bypassed by agreeing to the terms. Other websites provide access to private or military information. More dreadfully, however, are websites that use their explicit content as a promotion. These factors bring the conclusion that anybody of any given age can view and publish inappropriate or dangerous content. The current problems with the internet serve for clarification as to why the United States should create a nonpartisan assembly to censor the internet in order to protect its citizens from the mental, emotional, and physical harms the internet creates.
From music to television, censorship has played a major role in how the public is exposed to certain material. Now that our world is entering into a new technology era, the Internet is now in the middle of the censorship issue. Internet access is now one of the fastest ways to communicate with others, obtain information on virtually anything, and purchase items without having to leave your home. As more and more people get connected to this cyber superhighway, concern for the content of material has become a big issue. Since so many children are exposed to the Internet, some material should not be accessible with a simple click of a mouse. In order to protect our younger people from being exposed to mature and explicit material over the Internet, these sites should have a warning posted before one can go into the site.
It has become a sad and upsetting fact that in today’s society the truth is that the right to one’s privacy in the I.T (information technological) world has become, simply a joke. In an electronic media article “No place to hide”, written by James Norman, two interesting and debatable questions were raised: ‘Are we witnessing the erosion of the demarcation of public and private spaces brought on by the networked economy and new technology?’ Also, ‘What roles do government, industry and citizens have in regard to censorship and privacy?’ These statements ultimately end with the fact that it is impossible for Net users to expect privacy online, because online privacy doesn’t exist. However, one must ask, ‘What will be done about the problem?’ while keeping in mind that yes, the thin line between public and private spaces has been severed as a result of new technology. It is vital that everyone as users of the internet, be it government, Internet Service Providers (ISP’s), or individuals, need take the issue of internet privacy very seriously, while basing all actions towards the issue with the moral statement of, ‘Rights aren’t free, they’re earned’.
Another reason for not censoring the internet is the psychological effects that it can have on a child. The filtering of the internet can tell a child that adults do not trust them to surf the net on their own. This can lead them to believe that they can not make their own decisions, and that a computer determines what right and wr...
Since the internet has been available in schools and libraries in this country, there has been a debate about what should be accessible to users, especially minors. The amount of information disseminated on the world wide web is vast, with some sources valuable for scholarly and personal research and entertainment, and some sources that contain material that is objectionable to some (ie. pornography, gambling, hate groups sites, violent materials). Some information potentially accessible on the internet such as child pornography and obscenity is strictly illegal and is not protected under the First Amendment. Some information available on the internet that may be valuable to some is at the same time perceived to be worthless or potentially harmful to some. For libraries serving the public, there has been controversy on the issue of providing the internet, free of censorship or filtering, to users. While some librarians and their professional associations align with ideals of free and unfiltered access to all information provided by the internet, some feel that filtering internet content to exclude possibly objectionable materials is a reasonable measure to prevent potential harm to minors.
...Kids Points of View: Internet Censorship." 2011. Points of View Reference Center. Web. 21 March 2012.
Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, deals with a challenge to the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which Congress passed in 1998. The law, which is the subject of this essay, attempts to protect minors from exposure to Internet pornography by requiring that commercial adult websites containing "indecent" material that is "harmful to minors" use age-verification mechanisms such as credit cards or adult identification numbers.(Child)
Free speech on the Internet is a very controversial subject and has been the key problem surrounding the Internet today. The attempt to regulate and govern the Internet is still pursued by government officials. This subject has been intensified due to terrorist attacks against the United States and around world within the past years. The government believes that by regulating the Internet, it will protect the general public from criminal actions and eliminate the exposure of children to pornography or vulgar language. Senator Jim Exon of ...
Many opponents say that Internet censorship can protect their children from accessing bad websites which have a lot of violence and sexual content. Also, they believe that these materials can be harmful to teenagers and make them addicted. However, parents are the ones who should be completely responsible to prevent their children from accessing bad websites, such as pornography, and it is not the government’s responsibility. According to Opposing Viewpoint reporter Adam Thiere, “parents should be the ones to impose censorship on children, not the federal government.” Besides, some websites, which have educational information about safe sex or disease awareness, were blocked. Everyone has the right to use the Internet to find answers to private questions. In addition, teenagers can educate themselves. For example, when I have some questions about sex or sexually transmitted diseases, I cannot ask my parents because of my embarrassment. Thus, the Internet is the best choice for me. Nevertheless, when I searched those questions on the Internet at home, they were restr...
There are two real issues at stake when looking at this controversial topic. The first issue is finding a way to protect our children from potentially damaging material. There are advocates to censoring the Internet and removing this type of material because it will help shelter our children from this type of content. On the other hand, Free Speech advocates believe that it is the individual citizens right to have access to this typ...