A national poll released today by Common Sense Media asking how well social networks protect kids online produced an answer that should come as a shock to exactly no one:

Not very well, at least according to parents.

A full 75 percent of them gave social networking sites such as Facebook a negative rating for the task.

About 2,000 parents were polled by the nonprofit media organization, as well as 400 teens, who also gave thumbs down to social networks’ ability to police themselves.

There will be a big roundtable discussion on the topic in Washington, D.C., this morning, which will include Common Sense Media head Jim Steyer, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller.

Along with the poll results, San Francisco-based Common Sense Media said it will also announce the launch of the “Protect Our Privacy–Protect Our Kids” campaign to help parents protect kids’ reputations and personal information online.

I love the smell of impending privacy legislation in the morning!

Already from Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts: “As the House author of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, I remain intently interested in ensuring that children are not targeted online and their privacy is strictly protected. Twelve years after the bill was signed into law, entire new technologies and industries have emerged that could put children’s safety at risk, making a legislative update necessary. I look forward to introducing such legislation to bring COPPA into the 21st century.”

Thus, here is more for pols to chew on: The bulk of those surveyed are more concerned with online privacy than they were five year ago (another obvious one); parents do not believe Web sites, including search engines such as Google (GOOG), should share the location of kids (count me in on that one too!); and teens think their friends overshare (you think?).

But instead of me telling you, just read it all here in top-line results for adults and teens, as well as in the official press release:

Final CSM adults topline

Final CSM teen topline

Privacy Poll Results and Campaign Launch

Guess what? Google has too many Spocks and not enough Captain Kirks.

This is one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview last night–which you can see below–with well-known New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who has just written a new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”

This “lack of emotional intelligence” at the search giant, said Auletta, reminded him a lot of the subject of one of his previous books: Microsoft (MSFT).

Oh, the delicious irony!

Auletta was feted at a lovely party last night at the San Francisco house of Common Sense Media’s Jim Steyer, where a range of Google (GOOG) execs, Internet folks and fans gathered to talk about the book.

It’s all about Google, its history and, most important, its impact on the world. And how you look at the powerful search giant depends entirely on whether you are the changer or the changed, as Auletta stresses in multiple anecdotes in the book.

Traditional media, for example, have certainly been mucho irked of late about the impact of digital technologies on their businesses and have not been shy about casting blame most heapingly on Google’s Silicon Valley plate.

And government regulators are also giving the company the hairy eyeball, much as they had previously done to Microsoft.

Auletta and I talked about all of this and more in the video interview below, in which he notes that he told Googlers at a talk at their adorkable Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday that they need to focus less on being engineering brainiacs and more on trying to understand how to deal with fears of their growing power.

Here’s my interview with Auletta about this, as well as what old media needs to do to deal with all the change Google has wrought. (And you can see interviews I did with guests at the party, too).

And below that is one of the disturbing number of mash-up music videos about “Star Trek” buddies, the highly illogical Kirk and the Vulcanish Spock, the geek bromance of all time.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091112/author-ken-auletta-talks-about-google-and-its-lack-of-emotional-intelligence/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20080512/kara-visits-the-future-of-the-internet-book-party/ http://allthingsd.com/20080512/kara-visits-the-future-of-the-internet-book-party/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080512/kara-visits-the-future-of-the-internet-book-party/

This past Saturday night, BoomTown attended the tony San Francisco book party for Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.”

It was hosted by megablogger Arianna Huffington and Melanie Ellison, an old friend of Zittrain’s from high school, as it turned out.

And BoomTown took our Flip video camera, of course.

For one, it was held at Ellison’s stunning Pacific Heights home, with a lot of Internet and San Francisco wattage in attendance, including Melanie’s husband, Larry Ellison, and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

By the way, Zittrain is professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

And the book is actually not about stopping the Web–perish the thought, as what would I do with my life without my beloved Internet, which I would marry if it were legal?

Instead, according to Zittrain, my beloved Web is in deep, deep trouble!

He is justifiably worried about innovation continuing and the book is a bracing call to fix some of the Internet’s serious structural and other problems, before it collapses in a giant heap of too-tightly controlled mundanity.

I’m for that! Let Web Wackiness Worldwide (WWW!) reign!

In that spirit, here is a video of the party, in which I ask everyone the key question: What is the future of the Internet?

The video includes some book party speeches and thoughts from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Zittrain and, of course, Huffington (and I also got her to impersonate Tracey Ullman impersonating Arianna to up the wacky quotient) .

And also three Internet clowns trying to impersonate me. Wackier still!

Here’s the video (there is an odd voice/video disconnect in the Zittrain and clown sections at the very end that I am trying to fix):

[ See post to watch video ]

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