How Does Blocking A Phone Number Protect Children In Chat Rooms?
from the beats-me... dept
A British mother has apparently won the "top award" at "the world's largest invention trade show" for her invention to help protect her daughter in online chat rooms. That sounds great, but it's not at all clear how the device she describes does anything to protect children in chat rooms. Perhaps it's the BBC reporting, but it appears the device can be used to prevent a phone from dialing a specific phone number. That's it. What that has to do with stopping a child from using an internet chat room is beyond me. The one (fairly small) benefit I can come up with is the ability to keep a fairly unsophisticated child from dialing up while a parent isn't around to watch them. After all, if the parents aren't home already, can't the kids just unplug the device? Besides once they got online they could just go to any chatroom they wanted. Besides, why use a device when you could just do it in software on the computer itself? Finally, with much of the world rushing rapidly towards broadband, this sort of device becomes even less useful. While the BBC article suggests the woman may make a "fortune" on the device, it's not entirely clear why. It seems this is just another attempt to jump on the fears of parents about what their kids might be doing online, without being at all useful.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Now, if they could invent RFID tracking for box cu
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Now, if they could invent RFID tracking for bo
So don't be surprised if foreign media starts saying that "America killed the girl".
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Call Barring
Nothing to do with it's cousin Web-based Chat Rooms, at all.
So it allows you to bar calls to specified numbers. But the problem seems to me - how do you know which numbers to ban without checking 1000's out yourself? And if the daughter was disturbed by the one she called, isn't that enough to stop her going back?
I once took a first aid course for parents. They told a story of a Mum who was terrified of her kid getting a door slammed on her fingers. So she took the doors off in her house.
First thing that happens when the kid goes to play with a friend is that she gets her fingers slammed in door!
This approach is very similar. We shouldn't be preventing kids from going to these places, we should be educating them not to.
Russell
Blog: www.mobhappy.com
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Call Barring
I'm now wondering who the hell judges this huge invention convention - and just how bad all those other inventions must have been.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
your news sources
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: your news sources
I think what we really have here is a good example of how absolutely pathetic a bunch of male geeks can be. "Hey, I have an idea, let's give the award to that cute girl over there and maybe she will go out with us!"
Now if she's really clever she'll start selling a list of phone numbers that you should block with the device for an additional 29.95$. Updated every month for a 10$ a month subscription.
I wonder how many numbers the unit can hold? I have a really bad feeling it's some pitifully small number like 10.
msykes
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: your news sources
[ link to this | view in thread ]