protecting kids

August 30th, 2006

I was reading on Phillip Lenssen’s site about how it’s now a crime to use META tags to deceive a child into viewing a hurtful webpage. I posted my comments there, but I wanted to re-iterate here as well.

Who defines what’s harmful? a site saying there’s no santa when viewed by an 8 year old? A site talking about evolution to somebody from Kansas? An abortion site to a christian? The skeptics annotated bible having bible in it’s meta tags?

I can see the intent here is to shield children from porn sites that put “britney spears” in the meta tags… but like typical govt this is just flawed. That stuff is about 5 years too old. It doesn’t work. This is not an area the Govt needs to get involved in. If you don’t want your kids to see something harmful online, that’s your job as a parent; not uncle sam’s.

This law will serve no purpose other than an excuse to shut down more porn sites, and a pathetic attempt to appear to be protecting the children this ballot season.

The only real internet law we need will ban the internet from any children under 16 without parent supervision, and ban making laws about the internet from any politicians over 40.

What we really need to do as parents (ok not we, I don’t have kids) is take a more active role in our children’s lives so they don’t turn out like this kid. (He IS German… Phillip is that you as a young boy?)

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