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entertainment resources and certainly, it can be an important and useful tool to help
enrich and educate children. Most of the schools have introduced computers at
early stages, and children are capable of using the Internet for personal use. In the
last few years, computer literacy increased and more children are joining the cyber
space world for their day-to-day activities. Interactive online communications
provides tremendous opportunities for children (United States Congress Senate
Committee on Commerce, 1998), but at the same time, it presents unique
challenges for protecting the privacy of young children.
When children go online, companies may lure them to play a few games, solve a
few puzzles and attract them with offers of free gifts, free trips or awards, etc., and as
a result may collect personal information from them. Unlike adults, they may not be fully
capable of understanding the consequences of giving out personal information online.
Parents will not always have the knowledge, the ability or the opportunity to intervene
in their children’s choices about giving personal information. Therefore, companies at
times target children online for collecting information and create a serious threat for
privacy. One remedy for this concern could be controlling children’s access to the online
environment by their parents and educating the children about online environment
abuses. Another way could be thought of whether Internet service providers themselves
can give options to parents to restrict interactions with sites that may be in the business
of collecting information.
REMEDIES AND FUTURE TRENDS
As long as consumers look for online environments for cyber shopping, the
privacy concern up to a certain extent will remain unresolved. As consumers look
for convenience, companies may exploit these situations to collect personal
information.
Possible Remedies
There could be two methods to resolve the privacy concern. The first
method would be for the companies to enforce a self-regulated privacy policy