Friday, September 24, 2010

Big Brother Tracking Little Sibs 30% More Than Adults

Following up on how DP's course design plays out IRL. 

This just in from the "Regain Control" team: their Tracking Our Children entry analyzes data reported in the WSJ that kids' sites dropped 30% more cookies on kids' sites than in the fifty most popular adult sites.

Tabatha reasons: 
[W]e have to ask why companies on the net would use their resources any differently than television advertisers. If an advertiser twenty years ago utilized morning cartoons to sell sugary breakfast cereal, why would  an advertiser refrain from using the  internet gaming phenomenon to sell products today? Of course, some of the tools installed by the tested sites logged information that did not reveal privacy concerns, like where a user paused in a game. However, other tools tracked the outside sites visited by users, logging trends in their usage.
 Tabatha's analysis does more than posts generated by peers on other blogs in emac4325 because she knows she must explain the relevance of the data to us.  Her decision to historicize it by looking at Sat AM cartoons as precedent is insightful.

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