Stalkerware Developer Found Leaking Sensitive Data From Thousands Of The Software's Victims

from the it-all-starts-with-not-giving-a-fuck-about-anyone dept

Oh, if only this were more of a surprise. Another vendor selling sketchy spyware has been discovered to be careless with its handling of all the sensitive communications and data it pulls from victims' cell phones. (via Databreaches.net)

The company doing all the leaking is ClevGuard, which I guess is short for "clever." It apparently isn't. Its phone-snooping app, KidsGuard, is supposed to allow parents to monitor their children's cell phone usage. Obviously, there are other applications for it, like monitoring the activity of spouses, ex-spouses, girlfriends/boyfriends of the current and ex- variety, employees, dissidents, journalists… just about anyone someone else wants to spy on.

The name isn't deliberately misleading but the app disguises itself as a system update app, allowing it to hide in plain sight, untroubled by surveillance targets. The company even advertises the app's flexibility as going beyond monitoring kids to spying on other adults.

Zach Whittaker has the details on the leaky app for TechCrunch:

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the Android app from Till Kottmann, a developer who reverse-engineers apps to understand how they work.

Kottmann found that the app was exfiltrating the contents of victims’ phones to an Alibaba cloud storage bucket — which was named to suggest that the bucket only stored data collected from Android devices. It’s believed the bucket was inadvertently set to public, a common mistake made — often caused by human error — nor was it protected with a password.

Using a burner Android device with the microphone sealed and the cameras covered, TechCrunch installed the app and used a network traffic analysis tool to understand what data was going in and out of the device — and was able to confirm Kottmann’s findings.

The app -- in its full paid form -- is pervasive. In addition to hoovering up contacts, photos, SMS message content, and location data, it provides a wealth of information about conversations occurring in WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger. It also compromises more secure services like Snapchat and Signal by taking snapshots of conversations and relaying them to the company's servers.

The company has since shut down access to the leaky Alibaba cloud storage bucket, but the damage may already have been done. And it's just more evidence that companies selling malicious stalkerware care very little about the security of their customers… and even less about the security of their software's victims.

Filed Under: data breach, kidsguard, parents, snooping
Companies: clevguard

Senator Hawley Responds To Techdirt With A Bunch Of Nonsense And Lies About His Own Bill That He Doesn't Seem To Understand

from the you-did-the-what-for-the-who-now? dept

Hoo boy. We've criticized a bunch of Senator Josh Hawley's nonsense over the past few months. After all, he's the elite cosmopolitan "get big government out of business" Senator who is railing against elite cosmopolitans, while demanding that government get deeply involved in regulating companies. Well, not all companies. Just tech companies. It's almost as if Hawley is deliberately picking on companies that he thinks don't like his insane brand of politics. Anyway, while Hawley has introduced a slew of nonsensical bills targeting internet companies, the most laughable was the one that literally lays out what features certain websites can and cannot use. As we wrote in our post about it, Hawley seems to want to appoint himself the product manager of the internet.

Saagar Enjeti, a reporter for The Hill, recently sat down with Hawley, and Enjeti has posted some highlights from the interview. It's kind of scary that this guy is a sitting US Senator, as almost everything he talks about, he demonstrates an astounding, almost comical, level of ignorance or a clearly superficial understanding. But, hilariously, Enjeti actually asks him specifically to respond to my criticism that he's trying to appoint himself the product manager for the internet. Hawley's response is... not good.

Let's write out the transcript here, because it is unbelievable. It's so unbelievable that I don't even think Hawley understands what his own bill says, and I'm almost wondering if he's commenting about a different bill, introduced in the other part of Congress.

Enjeti: So I also want to talk about your SMART Act. It's probably the most criticized foray of yours within the Big Tech debate. Among other things, you've proposed banning infinite scroll, autoplay, limiting users to 30 minutes a day. A Techdirt columnist said you want to appoint yourself "product manager of the internet." What would your counter to that be?

Hawley: My counter is that parents ought to be in control of raising their children, not big tech. So parents ought to have tools and options and support. So take the thing limiting 30 minutes for apps usage. I mean parents can change that. It's a default setting. But it gives control to parents to say, "look, these tech companies whose entire business model is focused on getting my kids addicted and then stealing, essentially, their information, and then turning around and selling it, it's time to stop that."

It's time to give parents control. To say, look, if I'm comfortable with my kids online, fine, that's the parents' choice, and the kids' choice. But it shouldn't be big tech's choice. Big tech shouldn't be raising our children. Infinite scroll and autoplay. These are technologies, quote unquote, that Big Tech has developed, in concert with psychologists, to try to get us -- and, again, especially kids and teenagers -- addicted to their platforms. Why should they be able to do that without scrutiny? Why shouldn't we give parents the ability to say "no"? It ought to be a choice, but the choice and the power of the choice ought to be in the hands of the family. Not in the hands of some Google executive.

First of all, none of this makes any sense at all. Parents already have that control. Not tech companies. Parents can block their kids from using certain services or apps or can use any number of the fairly long list of third party services to help control how much their kids use these services or their devices. Isn't that the free market at work, Senator Hawley? Second, Hawley's bill doesn't actually do anything that he suggests above.

The word "parent" doesn't even appear in the bill at all. Regarding the 30 minute limit, the bill says nothing about parents, but does say that any social media platform has to default to a limit of 30 minutes per day for all users, and while it does allow those users to alter the limit, it resets every month, and Hawley's bill requires the services to continue to nag users. It doesn't say that the ability to change the limit should be for parents changing things for their kids. Indeed, how hard would it be for kids to change the settings?

The same is true of the ban on autoplay and infinite scroll. Those are listed as "prohibited practices" -- not "tools for parents to help their kids." Yes, it does say that services can offer a way for users to "opt-in" to both, but says this can be accomplished by "pushing a button." Does Senator Hawley think that kids can't push buttons?

Also, we won't even get into how wrong he is to argue these companies are either "stealing their information" or "turning around and selling it" (though, Senator Hawley, if they're selling it, can you tell us where to buy it? Because it's not actually happening. But, damn, you could really prove your point if you went out and bought that "stolen" information that you insist is for sale), but it seems worth pointing out that Hawley exempts autoplay ads from his autoplay ban. If he were really concerned about the privacy implications and the data implications of these services, then, um, wouldn't that include ads? But, nope, Hawley's all happy to let these companies continue autoplay if it's for making money.

And, while I'd normally say this goes without saying, it appears to need saying based on Hawley's own confused comments: how the hell is a bill that has the government "make choices" for you an example of "giving more choices" to parents?

Honestly, so much of Hawley's description of his own bill actually sounds like he's talking about an entirely different (but still dumb) bill, the one that was introduced by Rep. Goasar in the House, and which would require companies to offer content moderation tools for end users. That one, you could credibly argue, is about putting more control in the hands of end users (parents or not...).

But, really, all we're left with here is a Senator who doesn't seem to understand how technology works, what his own bill says or does, what it means for "big government" to meddle in private businesses, or, really, anything. How is this guy in a position of power?

Filed Under: big tech, choice, infinite scroll, josh hawley, parents, product manager, think of the children
Companies: amazon, facebook, google

EPIC Bravely Defeats 14 Year Old's Mom In Court To Continue Lawsuit Against Her Son For Cheating In Fortnite

from the punching-down dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about EPIC, makers of the popular Fortnite game, picking up the baton from Blizzard to pretzel copyright law such that it believes it can sue those that cheat in its game for copyright infringement. This belief centers on the claim that these cheaters break the EULA, despite the fact that no actual copying occurs when breaking a EULA. To make PR matters worse for EPIC, the company managed to sweep up a fourteen year old in its lawsuit-blitz. Despite the teenager supposedly being quite brazen in his use of cheats, and in his communications to others about how to cheat in Fortnite, I had assumed that EPIC would find a way to quietly back away from this particular suit, given how shitty the optics would be. It did the opposite, pursuing the case and seeking a summary judgement after the teenager failed to respond. The court refused, however, citing a letter to the court from the teen's mother, who argued that the suit against her son was overkill and, critically, that the argument over the EULA was null because her minor son couldn't legally enter into such an agreement without her input.

Rather than again trying to salvage some PR positivity from any of this, EPIC then decided instead to take on the mother's letter as a legal matter, with its lawyers countering it as a legal argument. EPIC argued that caselaw is clear that such contracts aren't void, even if one party is a minor, so long as that minor enjoyed the benefits of the contract. Unfortunately, the judge in the case has decided that he will not dismiss and will allow this lawsuit to move forward.

“As detailed in plaintiff’s response memorandum, defendant has not shown that the complaint fails to allege sufficient facts to state a claim for relief that is plausible on its face,”

“[T]herefore, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, plaintiff has stated a plausible claim, and the motion to dismiss must be denied.”

Now, in fairness to the judge, the court is required to adjudicate motions to dismiss with an eye towards favoring the plaintiff. Frankly, it was somewhat of a commitment to fairness that the court even allowed the mother's letter to serve as a motion to dismiss in the first place. On the other hand, it's useful to frame this ruling as one that comes from a judge steeped in the law, favoring a large company with a legal team likewise steeped in legal knowledge, and against the mother of a fourteen year old who cheated in an online game. When seen in that light, this whole thing is plainly ridiculous.

And dangerous, too, particularly as part of a trend in gaming companies misusing copyright law in this way to go after cheaters in online games. Yes, those cheaters are annoying. Yes, this teenager appeared to be a fairly bad actor. And, yes, EPIC has gone out of its way to suggest it wouldn't be trying to bankrupt this family and mostly just wants the cheating to cease. All of that can be true while it also being true that abusing copyright law in this way is both bad and opening a litigious door that we should want to remain shut.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, fortnite, parents, teenager
Companies: epic

Epic Decides To Double Down On Copyright For Cheating Lawsuit Against 14 Year Old By Taking On Mom

from the great-PR-you-have-there dept

When Blizzard decided to pretzel copyright law such that cheating in its online games constituted copyright infringement in a novel way that makes no sense, we warned that other game studios would join this insanity party and create a true judicial problem for the courts. Unfortunately for the world, we were right about that, and several other studios began claiming that such cheats broke EULAs and that this somehow resulted in copyright infringement, despite no actual copying occurring. Among those other studios was Epic, makers of the popular Fortnite game, but unique in that it managed to sweep up a 14 year old using a cheat in its lawsuits. The prospect of suing high school freshmen was likely not what EPIC had in mind with its lawsuits and, after the teen's mother responded to the court chastising the company for the lawsuit and also arguing that her son could not have agreed to the EULA as a minor, we noted what a massive PR nightmare this had become for Epic.

On top of all of this, a lawsuit against a fourteen year old simply for using a cheat for a video game is a public relations nightmare. On the other hand, Epic is in a horrible position. It would look odd to simply drop the suit against the fourteen year old because he's fourteen and still pursue the suits against the non-minor parties. Either what was done was either copyright infringement or it wasn't (it wasn't, but that's besides the point). The whole thing just looks... petty.

My assumption was honestly that Epic would run away from this lawsuit, given how horrible it would look taking on a teenager and his mom. Somewhat astonishingly, Epic did the exact opposite, served the teenager with a new version of its suit that redacted his name to his initials, and showed up in court. Neither the teen or his mother joined them and Epic asked for a default judgment. The court, however, refused to do so and instead decided to take the teen's mother's letter to the court as a request to have the case dismissed.

However, US District Court Malcolm Howard wouldn’t allow Epic to cruise to a win that easily. Instead, he ruled that the mother’s letter should be seen as a motion to dismiss the case.

“While it is true that defendant has not responded since proper service was effectuated, the letter from defendant’s mother detailing why this matter should be dismissed cannot be ignored,” Judge Howard wrote earlier this month.

Because of that, Epic again was faced with a choice. It could stop this insanity of suing a teenager for copyright infringement when no such infringement was committed, or it could respond in court to the angry, anguished plea of a teenager's mother. It chose again, unbelievably, to play the villain in this drama, and tripled down on its lawsuit. Its response mostly argues that the mom failed to make a legal claim in her letter, which, duh. It then goes on to claim that the teenager can't claim his status as a minor prevents him from signing the EULA because of all the benefits he got from signing it.

“This ‘infancy defense’ is not available to C.R,” Epic writes, pointing to jurisprudence where another court ruled that a minor can’t use the infancy defense to void contractual obligations while keeping the benefits of the same contract.

“C.R. affirmatively agreed to abide by Epic’s Terms and EULA, and ‘retained the benefits’ of the contracts he entered into with Epic. Accordingly, C.R. should not be able to ‘use the infancy defense to void [his] contractual obligations by retaining the benefits of the contract[s]’.”

I cannot stress enough how crazy this is on multiple fronts. The breaking of a EULA in this way is not copyright infringement. The claim in Epic's response is that the court should consider a teenager capable of entering a binding EULA, one which Epic theorizes cements copyright requirements, just because he played the game for which the EULA is written. And, ever present is the simple fact that Epic is going to all of these lengths to sue a fourteen year old that used a cheat in a video game. That's nearly insane enough to read like fiction, except that all of this has been done in a public court.

How any of this could possibly be worth the PR hit Epic is taking is beyond me.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, fortnite, parents, teenagers
Companies: epic

Shareholder Groups Say Apple Should Do More To Address Gadget 'Addiction' Among Young People: Should It?

from the won't-somebody-think-of-the-children-even-more? dept

In an open letter to Apple, two of its major shareholders, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, have raised concerns about research that suggests young people are becoming "addicted" to high-tech devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the software that runs on them. It asks the company to take a number of measures to tackle the problem, such as carrying out more research in the area, and providing more tools and education for parents to help them deal with the issue. The letter quotes studies by Professor Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, who is also working with the shareholders in an effort to persuade Apple to do more:

Professor Twenge's research shows that U.S. teenagers who spend 3 hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35% more likely, and those who spend 5 hours or more are 71% more likely, to have a risk factor for suicide than those who spend less than 1 hour.

Other quoted research found:

The average American teenager who uses a smart phone receives her first phone at age 10 and spends over 4.5 hours a day on it (excluding texting and talking). 78% of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50% report feeling "addicted" to their phones.

According to the letter, at least part of the solution needs to come from Apple:

we note that Apple's current limited set of parental controls in fact dictate a more binary, all or nothing approach, with parental options limited largely to shutting down or allowing full access to various tools and functions. While there are apps that offer more options, there are a dizzying array of them (which often leads people to make no choice at all), it is not clear what research has gone into developing them, few if any offer the full array of options that the research would suggest, and they are clearly no substitute for Apple putting these choices front and center for parents.

The Apple shareholders behind the letter admit that it is not entirely altruistic:

we believe that addressing this issue now will enhance long-term value for all shareholders, by creating more choices and options for your customers today and helping to protect the next generation of leaders, innovators, and customers tomorrow.

Building on this, they also shrewdly point out that Apple has little to fear from moves to give parents more control over their children's use of Apple products:

Doing so poses no threat to Apple, given that this is a software (not hardware) issue and that, unlike many other technology companies, Apple's business model is not predicated on excessive use of your products. In fact, we believe addressing this issue now by offering parents more tools and choices could enhance Apple's business and increase demand for its products.

That's in contrast to Facebook or Google, for example, both which want people to use their respective products as much as possible so as to maximize the opportunities for advertising. Apple has already responded with a fairly generic reply, published on the iMore site:

we are constantly looking for ways to make our experiences better. We have new features and enhancements planned for the future, to add functionality and make these tools even more robust.

Unless that functionality goes well beyond the perfunctory, it is unlikely to satisfy the shareholder groups, who presumably want the "full array of options" they mention. The danger for Apple is that a limited response might lead to it being swept up in the growing backlash against Silicon Valley and its products, evident in a number of recent articles. One thing Apple could do is to make it easier for third parties to write apps that address the problem in a thoroughgoing way -- something its tightly-controlled ecosystem may make harder than for Android.

A broader issue is how serious the problem of gadget "addiction" in children really is -- and how it should be tackled. Clearly, the parents play a key role here, but what about the hardware and software companies who profit from it? To what extent should they provide fine-grained parental controls -- should social media, for example, offer parents the capability to limit the number and timing of daily posts made by their children, and would that even help?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: children, ios, parents, phones, technology
Companies: apple, google

German Judge Fines Father Because He Didn't Tell His Kid Not To Engage In Piracy

from the going-to-fine-you-so-hard-your-dad-will-feel-it dept

Time for German parents to have "The Talk" with their kids. Unprotected sexual activity is probably fine. But casual seeding? That's a problem.

TorrentFreak reports that a German court has decided to hold a parent responsible for his child's infringing activity. This doesn't have much to do with the rightsholder being unable to extract fines from a minor, but rather a perceived parenting failure.

In a case before a Leipzig court the defendant denied having downloaded an audiobook, as he wasn’t home at the time of the infringement. His wife and 11-year-old son were, and as the case progressed it became clear that the latter was the offender.

Nonetheless, in a rather unique verdict the court decided to hold the father liable. Although it’s not uncommon for parents to be held responsible for the actions of their children, the court specifically referenced a lack of anti-piracy education.

The father countered that he had instructed his child to be safe out there -- to not do anything "dangerous" or "download random things." Apparently, that's not good enough, not when entities like GEMA roam the post-fatherland, slapping kindergarten classes with licensing fees, and courts show a willingness to hold registrars responsible for the illegal activities of their registrants. It appears that parents are supposed to act as anti-piracy educators -- a burden that usually falls on rightsholders and their representation, many of which have lobbied for intellectual property instruction to be inserted somewhere between the second and third "R."

In her order the judge writes that for proper parental supervision, it’s required to “instruct a child on the illegality of participating in illegal file-sharing exchanges, and to explicitly prohibit this behavior.”

To do otherwise is legally "negligent," according to the court. And it hinted the father lied about the computer use instructions he gave his child, presumably in hopes of avoiding fines and fees.

This is a ridiculous conclusion. Courts aren't going to be policing parental anti-piracy instruction until well after the fact, if at all. At that point, all it takes is a sworn affidavit to shift the culpability back on the child, and, at that point, the court is just going to shift it back to the parents of the minor defendant. There's no statutory basis for this sort of instruction and it's something that's (a) better handled by rightsholders and (b) likely to be just as ineffective in preventing piracy.

Filed Under: copyright, germany, kids, liability, parents

Austrian Teenager Sues Parents For Posting Pictures From Her Childhood To Facebook

from the family-court dept

When we talk about young people filing lawsuits over "oversharing" of information and/or media on social media sites, schools are typically the targets of the suits. Inevitably, whether school personnel originally sought access to a student's social media accounts for good intentions or simply to be a slut-shaming dick, the contents within the accounts are then weaponized for humiliation purposes.

But a recent lawsuit filed by an eighteen year old woman in Austria must have parents the world over wincing. At issue wasn't some random person or school official attempting to shame the girl. It was just her parents' sharing photos of a family member and now they face a lawsuit.

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting hundreds of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.

Legal expert Michael Rami was quoted by Austrian media as saying he believes she has a good chance of winning in court. The shared images include baby pictures of her having her nappy changed and later potty training pictures.

As a relatively new parent myself, I can assure you I'm paying attention. I haven't shared anything so intimate as potty-training photos of my two boys on social media, mind you, but who is to say what pictures my grown-up son might eventually come to feel is embarrassing? In the age of social media, I would think it's only pictures of our children that out-mass pictures of our food among those we share with our followers and friends. Well-meaning as we all might be, what happens if courts ill-prepared to tackle these kinds of disputes suddenly render this family sharing tortious?

To be fair to the young lady in question, it appears that her parents turned something of a deaf ear to her non-litigious complaints.

Despite her requests, they have refused to delete the photos - prompting her to sue them. "I'm tired of not being taken seriously by my parents", she said. Her father believes that since he took the photos he has the right to publish the images.

Because of our writing topics here at Techdirt, I'm basically thinking about intellectual property roughly all the time, but even I am having trouble imagining myself asserting this kind of defense as a father. I can imagine how frustrated the young lady must be at the callous attitude her parents have taken. But does it amount to something worthy of a lawsuit?

Well, Austrian law isn't as strict on matters of privacy and social media as other nations. As the article notes, the French government has gone so far as to warn parents against sharing photos of their children for fear of the social repercussions for them later in life. There's way too much hand-wringing in that kind of stance for my taste, but I can also see their point. I would hope, however, that the question comes down to delineating what qualifies as embarrassing content and what doesn't, rather than relying on any individual's interpretation. Otherwise, the courts could be a mess for a long time coming.

Filed Under: austria, children, parents, privacy, sharing, social media

French Parents Face Fines, Lawsuits And Prison For Posting Pictures Of Their Own Children Online

from the bad-news-for-oversharers dept

As Techdirt reported recently, the controversial "right to be forgotten" -- actually more of a right to be de-linked in search engines -- is starting to spread around the world. But its spiritual home is definitely in Europe, where privacy concerns tend to outweigh other considerations, like freedom of speech, that are regarded as paramount elsewhere -- in the US, for example. Leading the charge in the EU is France, which has been pushing Google to de-link items even more widely. According to a report in The Telegraph, France's zeal in protecting everyone's privacy may turn out to have some rather unexpected consequences:

Under France's stringent privacy laws, parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 [about $49,000] if convicted of publicising intimate details of the private lives of others -- including their children -- without their consent.

As if that weren't enough, French parents may also find themselves being sued by their own offspring for posting all those cute pictures of them when they were babies:

Eric Delcroix, an expert on internet law and ethics, said: "In a few years, children could easily take their parents to court for publishing photos of them when they were younger."

Grown-ups who sue their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children could obtain substantial compensation awards, according to French legal experts.

Leaving aside the question of whether it's really appropriate for children to sue their own parents for this kind of thing, there is another important point here: the fact that people are posting intimate pictures of their family life online with no thought for the immediate or long-term consequences. There's little awareness that once something has been disseminated online it's very hard to remove it afterwards. The good news is that Facebook, at least, is aware of the problem, and working on a possible solution:

Jay Parikh, a vice-president of Facebook, said the service was considering setting up a system to notify parents who put photographs of children online without restricting their privacy settings.

Mr Parikh said: "If I was putting online a photo of my kids playing in the park, and I accidentally shared it with everyone, the system could say: "Hey, wait a minute, this is a picture of your children. Usually you only send them to members of your family. Are you sure you want to do this?' "

Even here, of course, there are issues to do with Facebook's use of facial recognition capabilities, which would presumably be needed in order to provide this new system. But a gentle reminder that posting pictures of your children for all the world to see might not be a really wise idea -- just before you publish -- seems like a reasonable approach. It's certainly better than fining you, suing you or throwing you in prison afterwards, when nothing can be done about it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: children, crime, france, parents, social media

Company That Lets Parents Spy On Their Kids' Computer Usage... Has Database Hacked And Leaked

from the after-denying-it-all dept

There are lots of apps out there for parents spying on their kids computer/smartphone activities -- with the marketing pitch often being about how this will help "keep them safe" or some other such thing. mSpy is one of those companies, advertising right on the front page about how its snooping software can "keep children safe and employees efficient." It leaves out the bit about making both distrustful, but that's another debate for another day. Brian Krebs recently revealed that a "huge trove of data" had been leaked from mSpy and was being shared around the darkweb. And it exposed not just customer names but "countless emails, text messages, payment and location data" of those children and employees that the company was supposedly making "safe" and "efficient."

mSpy's response? Well, first it was to deny the breach entirely, saying that it was a bogus "predatory" attack:

“There is no data of 400,000 of our customers on the web,” a spokeswoman for the company told the BBC. “We believe to have become a victim of a predatory attack, aimed to take advantage of our estimated commercial achievements.”

And, of course, a day or two later, mSpy actually admitted the truth... which was that of course it had been hacked and had the data leaked.

"Much to our regret, we must inform you that data leakage has actually taken place," spokeswoman Amelie Ross told BBC News.

"However, the scope and format of the aforesaid information is way too exaggerated."

She said that 80,000 customers had been affected. Initial reports suggested up to 400,000 customer details had been exposed.

"Naturally, we have communicated with our customers whose data could have been stolen, and described them a situation. We put in place all the necessary remedial measures and continue to work on mechanism of data encryption," she added.

We'll see. If history is any guide, the hack may be even worse. In almost every story of a big hack into corporate computer systems, the initial estimate on the number of accounts impacted is too low, and adjusted upward at a later date.

Either way, it appears that in the process of trying to make children "safe" -- the company may have ended up doing the exact opposite.

Filed Under: brian krebs, children, employees, hacked, leaked, parents, revealed, safety, spyware
Companies: mspy

UK School District To Report On Parents Allowing Kids To Play More Mature Video Games

from the nanny-state dept

In case you thought the nanny-state arms race was over, it isn't and, also, who were you kidding? The initiation of laws and rules made by governments desperate to protect their own people from themselves is a pastime at this point, one which has previously seen legislative and law-enforcement actions taken against wearing headphones, smoking, and allowing children to find entertainment in the form of electronics. Now, in the UK, one school district is taking matters into its own hands, stating it will report to police parents who allow their children to play video games with an R18 rating.

This declaration was made in a letter warning parents of the new policy, authored by head teacher Mary Hennessy Jones, who heads up fifteen primary schools and one secondary school in Cheshire, England.

"Several children have reported playing or watching adults play games which are inappropriate for their age and they have described the levels of violence and sexual content they have witnessed: Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Dogs Of War and other similar games are all inappropriate for children and they should not have access to them. If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18-plus we are advised to contact the police and children’s social care as it is neglectful."

The letter sent home to some parents also mentions "inappropriate" social media accounts including Facebook and WhatsApp because it could "make them vulnerable to sexual grooming and explicit images."

If this isn't sending a shiver down the spine of any parents out there, it damn well should. The idea that a school district might seek to place itself directly in between a child and a parent when it comes to parenting decisions is somewhat without precedent when it comes to the type of entertainment the child engages in. This leaves aside the question of blatantly illegal content, of course, such as child pornography and/or real-life filmed violence. This is strictly about parents who decide (or choose not to decide) what types of legal entertainment their children are allowed to enjoy. As always, this overstep traverses a bridge built with platitudes about protecting children.

Threatening parents with calls to the authorities for a child even witnessing an adult playing an adult-rated video game is bad enough. Suggesting social media access could result in the same action (the letter does not explicitly say Facebook access will lead to a call to the police, but connects "social media sites" to "these games" in the bulleted list of "actions we are advised to take") pushes this whole thing into the realm of the completely ridiculous. While some parents may feel that it makes sense to restrict their kids' access to social media and violent video games, and there is arguably a place for schools to alert parents when the appropriateness of the entertainment content to which children are exposed inside and even outside of school is questionable, implementing a zero-tolerance policy on the choices of parents about their child's entertainment is the nanny state taken to an absurd level.

Filed Under: nanny state, parents, uk, video games