""Urban legends are projections of society's anxieties, hopes, fears, and worries," says Blank. "In today's society we have societal anxiety about what our kids are doing on the internet, the amount of control and information that's available to kids nowadays, societal fears about cyberbullying and how people are managing their mental health online, especially for kids."
"The Momo story reflects that anxiety of what is it our kids are doing online," continued Blank."
"To Lawmakers and School Administrators:
As parents and caregivers, there is nothing more important to us than our children's safety. That's why we're calling for an outright ban on the use of facial recognition in schools.
We're concerned about this technology spreading to our schools, infringing on our kids' rights and putting them in danger. We don't even know the psychological impacts this constant surveillance can have on our children, but we do know that violating their basic rights will create an environment of mistrust and will make it hard for students to succeed and grow. The images collected by this technology will become a target for those wishing to harm our children, and could put them in physical danger or at risk of having their biometric information stolen or sold. The well-known bias built into this technology will put Black and brown children, girls, and gender noncomforming kids in specific danger.
Facial recognition creates more harm than good and should not be used on the children we have been entrusted to protect. It should instead be immediately banned."
"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to.
Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."
"Do screens destroy kids' executive functioning? In short: no. Some types of screen use (in particular, non-educational, 'fantastical' shows) may have short-term impacts on attention, memory, or inhibition. But these effects don't seem to be long-term, unless screen use is excessive and interfering with other important activities. And some screens (educational apps, certain video games) may actually improve executive functioning skills. "
"The greatest gains came when gaming met needs the kids couldn't meet in real life. Different games support different aspects of well-being depending on how they are designed."
"Advertising agency JWT China and missing children site Baby Back Home have jointly developed an app in China that utilizes facial-recognition technology to help identify missing or kidnapped kids, Creativity Online reported. The organizations say that, with a population reaching approximately 1.4 billion, everyone can be a search volunteer."
"Jean Twenge blamed the iPhone and social media for a host of social problems in the post-millennial cohort.
But the technology thesis hasn't performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. "
"Could it be the phones? Absolutely! To be clear: the idea that phones are causing distraction both inside and outside of school hours, and this contributes to declining test scores, seems totally plausible to me-and preliminary cross-sectional data from the PISA report indicates the same. Might it be a good idea to keep phones out of the classroom? Definitely!
But, as often happens when an excerpt of a larger study makes the rounds online, some nuance is missing. Let's talk about what the data actually show. "
"There's no concrete evidence of long-term harm to our children caused by using our phones around them, but there's enough evidence of potential short-term effects that it makes sense to be mindful of it. Some amount of phone use around our kids is probably okay, but if we're absorbed in our devices in a way that interferes with our ability to connect with and respond to them, this can become a problem. Also, let's be kind to ourselves."
"The Details: The law requires people under 14 who have accounts to delete them. It also demands enhanced age verification for sites containing 'obscene' or 'harmful' content.
The Debate: Supporters view this as a welcome step towards child safety. Critics question the law's enforceability, querying account detection methods, use of VPNs by children, and age verification standards."
"It happened when Hello Kitty's fan site, SanrioTown.com, had its database accessed in late 2015. Here's the catch - it wasn't hacked. According to security researcher Chris Vickery of Kromtech, no hack was necessary. Vickery stated that pretty much anyone could access, "…first and last names, birthday…, gender, country of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes, password hint questions, their corresponding answers…," and more."
""Kids forget passwords all the time," says Alexander Cole, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Peekabu. "They're often unfamiliar with the concept of logging in, there is often no username or social media account to remind them of their password when they forget it. And it's a real problem because the BBC's really keen to have children creating accounts, making friends with one another, and playing multiplayer games with their friends from the real world."