Nanny state e-mail addresses for kids? Give me a break

Net Results:I was astonished and alarmed to see that a plan is seriously being mooted to assign a government-approved e-mail address to every schoolchild in the country.

An e-mail address that children are actually expected to happily receive and use. Yeah, right.

This misguided proposal is intended to create a system whereby the age of a child using the internet can be verified, which in turn, it is suggested, will help keep paedophile predators off social network sites like MySpace and Bebo, while also making young people more responsible online and less able to bully.

The proposal was put forward by Dr Rachel O'Connor, the Irishwoman who serves as the chief safety officer for Bebo, in an interview last weekend with The Irish Times.

This seriously makes me wonder if despite the academic accreditations, Dr O'Connor really understands the internet or teens, although I know she is articulate and intelligent and an expert on online paedophilia and child pornography. She has a PhD on the subject from University College Cork.

That's why I cannot understand how she could possibly think there's merit in this ludicrous system. Why? Because this is the nanny state gone mad.

It's one thing for a school or university to issue a student with an e-mail address; it is quite another to have the State issue them and use them as some sort of clumsy age verification system at taxpayers' cost when any self-respecting teen is never going to have something as totally uncool and babyish as a gov.ie e-mail address for their Bebo profile.

I mean, give me a break. Teachers and parents already know well that their kids are about a gazillion more times adept at using the net than they are. So trust me when I say that the vast majority of 13-year-olds are well aware they can sign up for any range of free e-mail addresses online which can be used to set up a Bebo profile, including those offered (and rightly unscreened for age or other private details) by the State's major internet service providers and mobile phone companies.

And most schools have long since blocked students from accessing social networking sites and popular chatrooms during school time anyway.

So how is this going to work? Will the nanny state register home IP addresses and require adults (the vast majority of Irish internet users) to somehow verify they are adults whenever they go online, in order to avoid the restrictions placed on child surfers?

Will all the social networking sites and chatrooms institute requirements that all Irish members must have a government-approved e-mail address to prove their age? Not only is this a waste of time and money and a privacy nightmare to manage, but such restrictions can still be oh-so-simply avoided by using anonymous surfing tools like proxys, which make it look like you are coming to a site from the US or UK, say, rather than Ireland.

On top of that, surely Bebo read the report out of the US recently that notes that a full one-third of MySpace users are between 35-49. I am sure some of Bebo's user profile must be of a similar age. So are they to ask all the grown-ups to prove that they are not 15? That will surely send them off in a hurry to other, more grown-up social networking site options. For that matter, so will requiring children and teens to sign up with a government e-mail address. The only kids likely to dutifully sign up with their assigned nanny state e-mail addresses will be the ones who would be meekly compliant anyway (or the ones whose mums stood at their shoulder while they set up their profile).

What do you want to bet that the next time they have 10 minutes alone on the family computer, they'll be creating a "real" profile on Bebo or a competitor with a Yahoo, Eircom, O2 or Gmail e-mail address? And with every small village having an internet cafe these days as well as free library access in many places, how is anyone going to continually police what kids are doing?

"Police" being the operative word, as the Government's ID system is predicated on the astonishing belief that kids can be totally controlled in their every way of accessing the net. They can't, and kids know it. The only adequate solution to the problems and, sometimes, real dangers kids can encounter (or create themselves) online is for parents and teachers to give them the positive guiding principles and sense of responsibility every child needs anyway, in all endeavours, not just online.

Parents also have to take a serious and active role in monitoring what children are doing online and in making sure kids understand precisely what the risks are and what is moral and immoral, cruel and manipulative or kind and friendly. Just as they should in other areas of life. That's part of what parenting means.

But parents also need to chill out and let kids - who are usually a lot more media-savvy than the adults who watch over them - have an online life. It may have been hanging out at the back of school in your day, mum and dad, but the net is a major part of how kids meet and mix these days. Any attempt to make them do something as silly as submit to living that online life controlled by a government-sanctioned identity (what is this, some repressive developing world omnipotent state?) is going to fail.

And do recall what the US Supreme Court has already made clear, in striking down several attempts by the US government to place child protection requirements on the internet and net access providers.

The internet was not created for children, said the justices. People do not have the responsibility to design how the net functions around the fact that children often use it.

The job of monitoring children online and giving them guidance to use the net safely and responsibly is the role of - yes! - the parent and an option for site operators, not a wannabe nanny state.