Your Kids May Be Telling The Whole Internet Your Secrets
from the i-learned-it-from-watching-you dept
Now that more and more of our lives are online, it's common to hear that torrid details of our lives somehow end up on the web browsers of potential employers doing background checks. Now, parents are now being warned that family secrets may be outed by their children, whose blogposts and comments may be a source of potentially damning information about their parents. The article claims that parents have lost jobs from their children describing their laziness, drug habits, and drinking problems. Police have arrested a woman, using her son's tales about his mother buying him and his underage friends a keg of beer as evidence. Perhaps instead of blaming the Internet for getting caught, perhaps these parents should take a look at themselves first, since it was their own illicit or inappropriate behaviors that actually got them in trouble in the first place.
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parents take responsibility?
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What about...
The employers or the authorities are probably going to act prematurely, and the parents will go through hell.
Too bad a kid, who posts lies and causes the parents to go through hell, doesn't realize that he will suffer 10 times worst than what the parents went through.
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Love to see the same comment and sentiment attached to a story about bittorrent use.
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"Perhaps instead of blaming the Internet for getting caught, perhaps these illegal downloaders should take a look at themselves first, since it was their own illegal behavior that actually got them on the receiving end of an RIAA/MPAA lawsuit in the first place."
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Someone's mother gets arrested for buying her kid(s) a keg? Okay, how old were the kids? Sounds like just another case of overzealous American Puritanism making an appearance. If the kid and his friends are, say, 19 or 20, do you REALLY consider their mom's behaviour inappropriate? Do you REALLY think that keeping the drinking age at 21 is necessary, considering that most of the non-Islamic world sets it at anywhere from 14 to 19?
So what can we look forward to now? The morality police power searching blog aggregators in a fishing expedition for "illicit and inappropriate behaviors", such as spitting on the sidewalk, loitering, smoking in bus shelters and so forth (all illegal in most North American jurisdictions).
This report really makes me uncomfortable with the possible directions it could go if this becomes commonplace.
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sure breaking the law is bad
this is another example of why judges need MORE discretion and not less (via mandatory minimum sentancing etc) in so far as most families give a glass of champagne to 20 year old family members.. it should be up to a judge to actually (gasp) weigh in, or JUDGE the matter for themselves, in the case of a party of 20-24 year olds, most people would agree that a mother shouldn't be punished (too severely) for trying to keep her kids and their friends off of the streets and out of harm's way, it's not that parents are powerless over their children and resign themselves to "giving in" to their urges, it's about empowered parents taking a proactive role in their children's lives and safeguarding them. I can think of many situations where staying home drunk is better than being out drunk.
but in the event that some random "bad" parent is out there throwing keggers for their middle schoolers and then leaving unattended, well then I suppose it would be at the judges's discretion to throw the book at them.
they say discretion is the better part of valor.
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Articles like this one are clearly biased against children. The author somehow assumes that parents know how to use the Internet correctly and that the only secrets leaked are the ones leaked by children. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there have been more fuckups by parents posting damning information about themselves on the Internet than by their kids posting the info.
Of course, the headline "Parents don't know how to use the Internet" is likely to lose readers (and therefore also lose money) because parents reading the paper will feel insulted. But the headline "Your kids are telling the Internet your secrets" gets great ratings at the expense of making all children look like fools.
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Kids blog the darndest things
If your kid is telling the truth, you're a bad parent. If he's making up insane lies, well you didn't raise him right, so you're a bad parent.
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Re: Kids blog the darndest things
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