Mommy Hacker
I just came over the term mommy hacker in the dictionary and it grabbed my attention, as I immediately had this controversial picture in my head: a mum hiding in the darkness of the night, following her criminal intentions…
Well, it is actually not that bad. The real explanation is: A mommy hacker is a mom, who out of worries controls the Internet activities of her children.
Following an article in the Guardian, those worries do not come out of nowhere: the book described in this article (Consumer Kids by Agnes Nairn and Ed Mayo) reveals that kids are becoming more and more web savvy and are spending an average of five hours a day in front of their computers. This makes them an easy target for marketers and webpages like Stardoll. This website targets more than 30 million girls, which create their avatars and dress them up in designer labels and are following role models in the Stardoll community.
Superbelly11, one of the young users of Stardoll finds that Stardoll is the only place in the Internet where she feels safe. Really?
Like on every other website, the children are asked to provide personal information like their email address for example. Therefore Stardoll counts to the 85% children’s websites that collect key information about their users, even though they are children; that makes it easy to market to them directly.
Brands know what the particular child purchases in its online world and use this information for their marketing.
Although websites like Stardoll provide Kid’s Privacy Policies and an Online Security Guide for Parents, as soon as the email address is out there it can be used and will never come back… not even the hacking mom can get it back.
And maybe she won’t even see the need to get it back, as she might discover in her nightly activities that the websites seem harmless, because the desire for the products they might create are invisible at the first glance as is the way brands market to children.
