 So, we promised a period of half hour or so of open comments on what we've seen over the last day and a half, so I want to start there. I know Larry Magged got cut off last time, so he'll get the first question. I do want to encourage those who are not members of the task force in particular to use this as a time to put questions or comments on the record. At 12, we will close sharply and excuse everyone who's not on the task force. We're going to spend the afternoon from 12 to 3 in a closed-door session. But from now till 12, I'd love to have comments or questions, particularly on the technologies we've been talking about, and comments most welcome as well as questions. So Larry, you get the mic first, which I think I might have here. And then again, to task force members, I'm going to get tried of place to those non-members for this half hour if that's okay. Well, I'm glad that you talked for a minute because it's really hard to follow those three very smart young people, and I'm really glad they were with us today. Is the question I was going to ask of Hamu, but actually it's a question that I think anybody in this room can think about. And it has to do with the unintended consequences of if we were to more successfully lock down services like MySpace and Facebook and Bebo and all the other social networks. If we were, for example, to empower parents to keep their kids off of these sites or to make it easier to keep their kids off from these sites, if we were to restrict access to 16 or possibly even 18, what might happen? Hamu mentioned the suicide prevention hotline. There are children alive today who would not be alive if it weren't for social networking sites. You also talked a little bit about the high-risk kids. No doubt about it. I think you're absolutely correct. And we've seen that with the researchers here at the task force. There are children who do risky things offline, that do risky things online. Often they do not have the parental support. Often their parents wouldn't be available or willing or able to validate them through some kind of a permission process. So we worry about a lot of things, gay and lesbian teens who might be prevented from understanding their sexuality. We worry about kids who are suicidal. We worry about kids who might want to find out information about STDs. There's a lot of stuff out there. And Anne and I did a little memo on this. But I'm wondering, should we be worrying about these unintended consequences? And might we have more harm than good if we were to successfully lock down these services? I'm happy to have responses to that. But I'm also happy just to go to other comments. Professor Harry Lewis, back here in the- Jump in and follow that, because I asked this question yesterday about the developmental consequences if we move to a state of sort of blanket surveillance of children. And I'd just like to question the philosophical premise from which that world seems to be emerging, that as parents we have a fundamental responsibility to keep our children safe. Obviously, none of us wants our children to be endangered. But it's kind of our responsibility to make sure they're safe. And that so measures like the ones that have been talked about yesterday, which would call me on the cell phone as soon as my son or daughter types certain words into their internet browser are things which I would almost be negligent if I didn't embrace and make sure that my neighbor's embraced as well. And this is a question that I would just like to put is whether there is a moral or even potentially legal flip side consideration of the rights of young people, certainly 17 year olds. And you take it down, I don't know where the age cutoff would be to free expression and the right to seek out information on their own without supervision by any adult, including even their parents. If I kind of think there is some such right in there, I don't know what age it would start at. Just from where I philosophically said, I would tend to think younger rather than older, but whatever it is. But if we go to the extreme on parental responsibility for supervising the words and what the word spoken and heard by young people, then you have to deny the right of children for some kind of, as Larry said, seeking out knowledge or expressing themselves to other people. I just philosophically and legally I don't know where that balance has to be struck. Thanks. Thank you. And I commended yesterday to you Blown to Bits, which is a book written by Professor Lewis and two others, but he's also blogging on this topic on Blown to Bits.com, is it? Bitsbook.com. And he's got a blog post on yesterday and is, I think, a helpful guide fly to this conversation among others around here. Please. Hi. I'm Rod Zias. I'm the CEO of EGuardian, but I'm going to answer this question as a parent of three teenagers rather than as a CEO of a company that does age identification. I don't think, first of all, I think the parent is the best arbiter for their children of what's going to be appropriate or not appropriate. And as children get older, they do get more rights, and that's a healthy part of our society. But parents are ultimately responsible for who their children are from the moment they're born until they become adults. So I don't want to take away the authority of the parent. I think what we need to offer is more choices, and choices inherently mean less censorship. Before movies had ratings, there was a whole list of things you couldn't do in a movie. You couldn't kiss for more than three seconds, and you couldn't do certain things in violence or whatever the case may be. Movie ratings allowed parents to have a tool that said, OK, do I find it appropriate for my child to go to a PG-13 film or to a G film or to an R film? And I sometimes make those. There are a lot of things I'll let my children watch with me that I probably wouldn't let them watch on their own. There are some things that I find very objectionable, like violence, where sex in context, I think, is a normal thing for them to be able to see. That's my right as a parent to do. What I think is objectionable for most parents today is that, number one, they're not been given tools. They're not giving options or visibility into what's going on there, and many of them don't have the time or the tools to do that. So I think whether you're a social networking site like Facebook, which I think has been doing an excellent job of trying to bring some transparency there, or you're a site like Myspace, which I hope can work on this a little bit further, we need to be able to give parents a way of tools to be part of the conversation and not lock them out of what's going on. Thank you, Sahara. My name's Sahara Burr and I'm an assistant professor at Cornell and Department of Communication. And what I just would like to say really quick speaks to these two comments. I study the way children resist messages that are supposed to help them and why they do that and all the different reasons, and especially messages that are supposed to protect them from negative effects of the media. So I've learned a lot in this meeting. I've just been given some funding to conduct a national sample survey that looks at parents' responses to different technologies and different strategies, not just technologies, but also media literacy interventions and rating systems and all kinds of other strategies that I've been looking at in other contexts, but in the context of internet safety. And I'm putting out a call to talk to me if you have something. I've learned a lot about what to put on there today in terms of what the major concerns are, what the different strategies are from a technology perspective. But if there's something that you think needs to be known about this topic, I would love to hear from you. So please email me at Cornell or talk to me afterwards. Sahara, thank you. We're very excited to see the results of your work. And I want to make a special researcher's plea to those who are running social networks to be friendly to researchers. This is an area in which you are now public spaces, effectively in my view. And I really think those who have been cooperating closely with researchers have been aiding the public dialogue. Those who have been more close to that, I would urge you to open up some more. That's a special little plea. Can you please pass it to Wendy Seltzer here and then? Thanks, that's a great comment for me to follow up. Wendy Seltzer, I'm a fellow with the Berkman Center and a law professor. And I'm impressed with what I heard this morning about the voluntary steps that companies are taking and the effect that that has had in creating safe spaces. And I'm more impressed by that than by the rush into find the technological solution that will save us all. What I think this space needs is really good social science research into how kids are interacting online, how parents can help them to understand the technology. It was great to hear from young people who are using the technology and who are going out to talk to their peers about how to use the technology safely. And research on what the real threats are. Obviously, none of us will disagree that every harm is serious and even one child hurt online is something to be taken seriously. But I worry that we all hear about the one child who has been hurt and exaggerate the problem when we hear less about the flip side of all of the children who have been helped by having places where they can talk with their peers and with others who are in cohorts slightly older than they are who can help to educate them about safety issues that they may not necessarily get from their parents or from their local community. Wendy, thank you. And thank you very much for your personal leadership in this field to be sure. Go to the gentleman from Netanyi, but one just notes for those who are not on the test force. One of the things we're doing this afternoon is having a first peek at the literature review which Dana and Andrew have put together. That's something that will become a public document. It's not there yet. It's in a very early first not for distribution draft. But what it's doing is looking at what good social science research has happened, has occurred, trying to catalog all of that and to identify frankly the gaps. We know that there are many gaps in our understanding about that. And I think that's also where this partnership between academics and social networks and others in this space can bear fruit. Please, sir. Just speaking to Wendy for a second, I think the Pew Internet. Can you just tell people there? I'm Peter Fairley from Netanyi. And speaking to what you just mentioned, I think the Pew Internet Life and Research Group does a great job and they have a lot of great stats around some of the things you mentioned. My question goes out actually to the Teen Angels. I want to talk about it in the gentleman in the back who talked about privacy for children. It seems from the stats in the Teen Angels what you guys have done that 70% of people's friends are cyberbullying them. And I've seen ads in the ad council that talk about how kids will step outside of their personas and say and do things that they wouldn't do to their friends in real life, let's say. So there's been a lot of talk about the place of being anonymous online and how that is the place. It seems that when kids are not educated properly that everything that they do online is put somewhere and everybody can see it at some point and they do step into that persona of being anonymous that these issues then happen. So when it comes down to what they spoke about about identity verification and not age verification, that seems to be the real ticket or the real way to cut through a lot of the cyberbullying and a lot of the sense of when these tweens and teens step out of their personas and take on these things and say these things that are harmful and derogatory to their friends or other kids that if they had those abilities to have the ID verification at some level that that would cut a lot of that out. And I just wanted to say that I have kids and I do talk to high schoolers and middle schoolers and I tell them to expect no privacy online at all. And if they can have that expectation and understand everything they do is being logged and put somewhere they'll have a better understanding of the long term. We've heard, everyone's heard stories about on the MySpace or Facebook, putting a picture of you drinking beer or doing drugs or doing something that you don't want your employer to look at when you get out of college and they Google your name right away. And that seems to be another big issue that hasn't been brought up. But anyway, I just wanted to talk to you. Professor Lewis, do you want to respond? Well, the question is the data that said that 70% of their friends are doing things and that what the ad council is doing, when you're doing your research, do kids step outside of who they really are when they're doing things online? Okay, so do you mind just talking to Mike? Sure, sometimes they do step out into that anonymity factor, but a lot of the times kids are able to figure out that it's their friends cyberbullying them. Maybe they gave a certain piece of information to only one friend and so when that gets passed around they know how it happens. And a lot of times kids are smarter than their friends realize and they're able, just like people are able to do a little research, they can figure out how things started and kids are also very into gossip and a lot of times they get sped around who started certain rumors or started instances of cyberbullying. So we did find across the board in our research that friends, cyberbullying friends was a significant problem. And I'd like to pass the mic to Dana Boyd just for one sort of data intervention from her end as well and then we'll swing back on this side where data gluttons around here. The thing we also know just generally about when people go on to be anonymous and to be sort of stepping outside of their identity is there's sort of two kinds of clusters of practices that go on in these spaces. They can best be understood as interest driven and friendship driven. Friendship driven means going online with your friends, going on there to hang out with your peers and your schoolmates and in many ways including the bullying of your peers and your schoolmates. That is primarily identity sort of localized which means I may say that I'm 95 years old but I'm still Dana and my friends still know how old I am and we have this sort of circle going on. Then there's a set of interest driven practices. Now the interesting thing historically is that the early internet and the early web was almost all interest driven. This means that you go on and you go because you're really interested in anime and you find all of the other kids that are really interested in anime with you and there's that sort of motivation to be there and in many ways that core group, especially in the early days was stepping outside of identity because they didn't like their everyday lives. This was hardcore marginalized, ostracized, socially outcast kids of which I was one of. I grew up online desperate to escape the hellish identity that I had to deal with every day at school. What's happened as we've seen the online environment go is that as things have gotten more and more friendship driven the vast majority of behavior is very much identity local. There are still the marginalized kids out there desperate to escape identity and in some ways they are at a totally different kind of risk than what we're talking about mainstream. The most noticeable of this group of the marginalized kids are queer kids and all of the research is looking at GLBT kids, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual kids. They are in much greater risk because they're stepping outside of their identity and they're doing so with a sexuality intention practice and interest which puts them into a totally different dynamic. So in terms of figuring out this sort of topology you have to think about what kinds of practices people are going into and why they're going and when they would step out of identity or not. But the majority of kids, they're going on to hang out with the people they already know. Thanks, Dana. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you for a voice of reason. Is it okay if I defer to the non-task force members and then come back or is that okay? Hi, I'm Braden Cox and I'm with the Net Choice Coalition and I'm not a task force member and I appreciate being able to be here at this open meeting and thank you, John, for hosting this and understanding what the process has kind of been all about. Well, you mentioned the Socratic method earlier. I got me thinking we're here at Harvard Law School. What would Professor Charles Kingfield do at the paper chase? So if you're in the audience, I think you'd have three questions of the task force here for the task force to consider later on and I think the first one would be, what are the problems? Let's identify what the problems are and is it something like turn to your left, turn to your right, one of you are gonna be molested online or is it something that's a little more nuanced than that? The second one I think would be, what technologies can help solve these problems and are they gonna be effective at that? And then the third one, and I think the book that was put together has actually tried to address those first two, but I didn't hear it today that much was actually, it's not whether the technology works, it's whether the technology works to make children safer and I think it's that third point that is gonna be the primary directive of this task force and that's something I look forward to hearing about. Thank you. Very helpful, thank you. I want to acknowledge that both Mike and Anne of the task force would love to get in and I will let them in but I do wanna, to the extent there are others now in the task force, give them a voice. Why don't we go to Mike since we're here and Anne next and then others can think of their questions. Okay, this is, wow, there's a voice activated microphone and it's actually on. Mike McCann from Verizon, I'm on the task force and I wanted to ask this question now since it's fresh, we didn't get a chance to talk to the Teen Angels, ask questions of the Teen Angels directly. So 70% of kids are sharing and this is directed right at you guys, 70% of kids are sharing their passwords with their friends, it seems like then 70% are getting cyber bullied, not pay me not the same 70%, but it seems like sharing password, sharing their passwords can lead to more bad things than good things. Is there something, is there a downside if industry was to develop a tool that would prevent people, kids from sharing their passwords? I mean, or maybe saying it another way, is there a good reason why we should let kids share passwords? It's a great question, thank you. Casey, reaching for the mic again. Passwords should be shared with the kids' parents and only the parents. So the kids should know it and the parents should know it and there's no reason for anyone else to know it. So I don't think there'd be any downside to that because as long as the parents know it and the kids know it, no one else needs to know it, no one else should be going into that kids' account. It's very often that the kids share it online, they, you know, with the IMing and the social networking, it's very easy to pass on information and that opens up an entirely new danger because once something is online, it is so accessible and a lot of kids don't realize that. So they think that just because they send something out and they think it's private, they don't understand that it could be copied, it could be forwarded. There's so many other ways to get that password to different people. All right. Well, that's not very common, but what is very common is, hey, I can't get to my email right now, can you check something for me? Or hey, I left this book at school, can you log on to my email and just, you know, write something, leave me a message, write something for me so I can get it later or get it from a different location. It's not outright. Here's my password. Have fun. Helpful. So I just want to turn to Dana and see if she's got a further note on the score from the data bank. Sorry, I actually interviewed tons of kids about why they change, share their passwords. So I actually have a pretty good topology of some of the different dynamics of it. There's a variety of different reasons. You have one, which is just sharing it, you know, like they said, for getting access to, you know, I can't get to my email right now. I think that's actually much broader than that and I think that this is actually where class comes into play in an extreme way. The more that schools and libraries and other places have banned access to Facebook and MySpace, the more a variety of kids cannot get online through the places that they are able to get online. So a lot of the kids, especially in working class communities who have no access to it in those public spaces know which friends have access at home, give the passwords to those friends who have access at home and will have them call up to check their information all the time. That's a really interesting side effect and cost of all of the banning that we've been doing. This also happens in the home environment. When kids are in trouble and they've been banned or their parents don't like the technology, they ban it there, they give it out to all their friends to check in them and then call when there's a new message. So the kids are supposed to check all of the friends that they can't check. Another cost of this sort of banning attempt. Mobile phones are another funny one. Kids can't actually do certain things on their mobile phones so the kids who only have access on their mobile phones will give out their friends passwords to do other things. Kids also give out their passwords to have their friends make more complex profiles. This is particularly common in my spaces because they don't have the technological fluency. They're like, hey, you know how to do this. Here's my password. Will you figure this out and set it up and just give it back to me? Right, which is another dynamic of it. Another thing that I find really interesting and probably a little bit more disturbing is the ways in which in dating relationships, when boys or girls are dating, they give each other passwords as a form of trust, a symbol of trust, and that that's a way of proving that they're not cheating on each other, right? That they can check each other's messages to make sure they're not cheating. So what are the dynamics there? And of course, there's a friend component to this as well. Now, I think that understanding why, as much as I agree that passwords probably shouldn't be given out to anybody other than parents, I think that understanding why is really critical because there's a whole set of dynamics here that are at play, that are motivating reasonable thought processing. These are not stupid kids. They're doing this for a very logical set of steps, but the thing is that these same tools that are being given for this sort of logical step can again be turned around for some of the worst of bullying. And so that's where you get these dynamics at play. And they're also totally right. Kids can guess each other's passwords like nobody's business. And one of the things I'm surprised that they didn't point out is that the worst of it tends to come from siblings where you don't even have to guess the password. All you have to do is get onto each other's computer and then play those games. So there's also that component in all of this. And then that gets getting out. The other thing is as more and more computers which allow you, which you never remember your password, you save them on your computer. Siblings also give each other siblings passwords out. Which is another component of that that plays in. Thanks, Dennis. So Ann and Blair have their hands up. Maybe if you guys can just keep them tight, that'd be awesome in case someone else wants to. Is it too hot? Thank you. And now just talk. Okay, now I'll talk briefly. I really, I appreciated what Hamu said earlier about online safety being a journey, not a destination. And one thing I think we need to be mindful of is that this is a transitional problem in a way. John and hers talk about the digital natives and very, very soon, a lot. The vast majority of these digital natives are gonna be parents. And so we're really dealing with a moving target. These digital natives are getting smarter by the day. But parents are too. And I think we need to, not only do we need to be reality based and research based and we aren't yet, we really need to get there. But we also need to observe this great experiment called the social web as it goes and learn from it collectively, actively. And see where it goes because the actual practices on the social web are changing as people learn how to navigate it and negotiate it. Great, thanks, and there. Hi, this sort of goes to the comment. Do you mind just saying? Blair Richardson from Aristotle of identifying the problem. And one of the things that there's sort of a dearth of, and I make this comment in the open session because there are researchers here that are not gonna be in the closed session. There really seems to be a dearth of information about what the behavior of online predators is when they're in these social networks. What are they doing? Where are they going? When they get identified and kicked off, where do they go? Do they try to come back in? Are there interviews? Are there studies? Is there research of what these people are actually doing? They're really the most dangerous members of society to kids. And if there is anybody that is aware of studies, research, interviews, anecdotes, anything, I think it would be really helpful to the whole task force to address that exact question of what's the problem. And certainly the task here of the Research Advisory Board is to roll up what's good there, to be sure. Very brief is that there's almost none because it's methodologically how? Honestly, the numbers are so low that the people that have been arrested for these kinds of things that even doing post-FBI interviewing is very difficult. The other thing is that the DOJ does not release a lot of what they do in terms of the interviewing around this. So it's not that people don't want to do this. There's only one research project out there that actually investigates people post-FBI interviewing. And other than that, it's really difficult. They're coming up with the second one soon. But this is where you get tracings, which is only a certain amount of information. You don't actually, understanding the logic requires interviewing. So it's a question of what you want to understand. There's a lot more understood through the tracings. There's a lot less understood through the logic of why and why is an interview question. Then we'll come back to this when you talk a little about the literature review in a moment. We're almost at time, but is there anyone not a member of the task force who wants to get on the record at the moment? Please. Can we get a mic over here? Thanks, Anne. Please tell us who you are. Hi, Kate Schroeth from iCouldBe.org. I just wanted to remind the task force that, while I'm thrilled that 100% of all the parents attending the conference are very responsible with their children's online lives, there are millions of children out there who do not have that in their homes. And that it's a very vulnerable population that we have to think about as well. As well put, I think that is the note on which we should end this public session. A wonderful, wonderful comment. And thanks to everyone for participating. All right, so we're gonna take a break for the next hour. So I think we have just kind of a lunch period. Jess, we'll return here at one for the actual discussion. Okay, task force now, we would love to welcome you over at the Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street. There's gonna be a resetting of tables and so forth. Then task force members and the select number of the TAB are gonna come back to here at one, right? Great, see you back.