By Michael Brody, M.D.

An overlooked and frightening problem in this computer age is that young children are going online, interacting, and being co-opted to give personal information to commercial Web sites designed specifically to attract youngsters, for example those by Nabisco, Oscar Meyer, Disney, and Crayola. This is a long way from old-time radio promotions where listeners sent off an Ovaltine lid to receive a Captain Midnight decoder and has the potential for serious consequences.

In cyberspace there is direct interaction between child and advertiser. Play money, prizes, and more contact are being used to reinforce positively a child's computer activity, so that advertisers can get even better demographic data to manipulate child consumers with personal microtargeting. What child could resist a birthday card from the Blue Power Ranger? Unlike television, which can't collect personal data from all who watch, has rules about separating commercials and programming, and enforces commercial time limitations, the Internet has no such restraints.

An unsupervised child using the Internet may be subjected to all kinds of unsuitable subjects, possibly pornography, but definitely intense advertising. Even if the computer has software to lock out exposure to inappropriate material, there are still the "children's" Web pages that invite them into a fantasy world of prizes and commercials.

A site on the World Wide Web is a visual guided tour that appears on a computer screen and provides information in attractive graphics about a particular subject. Kellogg's, for example, which spent over $2 million on its site, calls its site Kellogg's Clubhouse. Snap, Crackle, and Pop act as hosts at the cereal company's site, encouraging children to explore different rooms, each filled with more images. The Kellogg's General Store is filled with merchandise.

Of greater significance and pointed out so well by the Center for Media Education in the monograph Web of Deception is that when kids "click on" a Web site, they leave traces of who they are, known as cookies. Cookies are files on the hard drive (a computer's permanent memory) of all Netscape (a guide to move around the Internet) users that log every site visited. These can be accessed covertly by companies to develop an individual profile of the kid user. Kids are also approached "directly" to register on the site by various fictional spokespersons, like Commissioner Gordon on the "Batman Forever" Web site, who invites users to answer questions about themselves for "the Gotham Census." With this information, microtargeting and more personal advertising become easy.

Is this appropriate? NO! What parent allows his or her child to enter into any dyadic interactive relationship, giving information to an adult stranger, especially one posing as a comic character? This is clearly an issue of consent. We don't allow our children the right to drive until they are at least 16 or to drink until they are 21. We sign forms for class trips and scout overnights. Parents determine consent, especially for young children.

When I represented the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on privacy protection, there was much discussion of marketing theory and computer capabilities, but I was shocked that little was said about child development. As Piaget postulated, children are not small adults. Children develop cognitively in stages. Mature judgment evolves during the stage of formal operations and post-conventional morality. This is why young children can be easily exploited by the advertising industry, which sees great potential in using a child's lack of judgment and the demographics the kids supply to sell more products.

Through advertising's use of the media, our society is promoting a generation of ever younger superconsumers.

Soon, like television, cyberspace will be part of all children's lives. The Web sites unfortunately are already variations and spinoffs of children's TV programming, where content is not used to inspire, discover, or solve--only to sell.

It is imperative that we as psychiatrists understand the dangers inherent when information is covertly collected from children while the online services are in their relative infancy, because the future will certainly bring this new medium and its commercial messages to a wider population.

We should explore the promotion of technology that can block access by children to certain parts of the Internet. We should cooperate with organizations like the national PTA, Consumers Union, the Center for Media Education, and the publication Privacy Times in their efforts to protect children from online invasions of their privacy and from attempts to gain information from them.

Our children's egos rest in our hands. This is not just an issue of consent but one of trust.

Dr. Brody is a child psychiatrist in private practice and director of the Psychiatric Center, the District of Columbia's largest provider of care for the chronically mentally ill. His commentary is adapted from an article appearing in the September/October issue of AACAP News. (Psychiatric News, February 7, 1997)