People Who You Cannot Trust

Are They Selling Your Child's Data to Junk Food Makers or a Child Sex Ring?

The publishers of the software known as nannyware:

A software product sold to protect children from predators, cyberbullying, and visiting inappropriate Web sites is also collecting information about what the kids are saying, and its publisher is selling that data--in aggregate form--to other companies for marketing purposes.

In an interview, Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene said that the company doesn't collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children. "We never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it. In fact, we don't have any information about the individual child," he said.

Yeah, sure, as has been noted with Netflix, bits apparently innocuous data frequently make it trivial to identify a user.

In the case of Netflix, by knowing a couple of their video likes and dislikes, you could extract their entire video rental history with a probability of 28 standard deviations (99.87% probability, or a bout 1 in 800)

You know, if this were video rental data from adults, as opposed to conversations online by children, this would be illegal.