NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (202) 387-8030
For Immediate Release: January 29th, 2001
Commercial Alert Calls Web-Filter Company N2H2 a “Corporate Predator”
Following a news report that the Web-filtering company N2H2 Inc. gathers data on children as they surf the Web in school and sells it to marketers and the Defense Department, Commercial Alert director Gary Ruskin called N2H2 a “corporate predator that snoops on schoolchildren for monetary gain.” Commercial Alert urged parents, school board members, principals and teachers to rid the schools of N2H2’s child-tracking software.
Commercial Alert sent a letter today to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking the Defense Department not to hire N2H2 to spy on the Web-browsing of the nation’s schoolchildren. The letter said that “During the Clinton Administration, the Defense Department must have grown confused about its mission. It should spy on national security threats, not our own schoolchildren.”
On January 26th, The Wall Street Journal reported that N2H2’s Bess filtering system “knows where the students go on the Web and how long they spend there....Late last year, N2H2 began selling its data. The information, called Class Clicks, is aggregated, meaning it can’t be used to identify surfing habits of specific students, or even specific schools....for $15,000 a year, marketers and Web-site operators can get monthly reports that detail where kids are going on the Internet, along with Roper Starch’s aggregate estimates of the kids’ ages and races.” The Journal noted that, so far, N2H2’s only clients for the student marketing data are BigChalk Inc. and the Defense Department.
N2H2 is widely used in the nation’s schools. According to the Journal, “Just under half of all schools and libraries use some sort of filtering software, and N2H2 has 20% of this market, according to International Data Corp.”
“Schoolchildren should not be for sale, nor should they be pawns in any corporation’s marketing plans,” Ruskin said. “N2H2 is trying to turn the schools into little market research factories.”
“The use of N2H2 software is an abusive extension of government power to enable marketers to spy on unsuspecting schoolchildren,” Ruskin said. “N2H2’s data gathering and surveillance practices are creepy. It is not the proper role of the public schools to help corporations or the Defense Department to obtain information from vulnerable schoolchildren. School board members, principals and teachers should work together to rid the schools of N2H2’s prying software.”
Following is today’s letter from Commercial Alert to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Dear Secretary Rumsfeld:
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Defense Department is a client of N2H2 Inc., which uses child-tracking software to snoop on the Web-browsing of our nation’s schoolchildren, and then sells the data to marketers.
According to the Journal, N2H2’s Bess filtering system “knows where the students go on the Web and how long they spend there....Late last year, N2H2 began selling its data. The information, called Class Clicks, is aggregated, meaning it can’t be used to identify surfing habits of specific students, or even specific schools....for $15,000 a year, marketers and Web-site operators can get monthly reports that detail where kids are going on the Internet, along with Roper Starch’s aggregate estimates of the kids’ ages and races.”
During the Clinton Administration, the Defense Department must have grown confused about its mission. It should spy on national security threats, not our own schoolchildren. Please straighten this out, and cut all Defense Department ties to N2H2 immediately. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert
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Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert’s website is at http://www.commercialalert.org/.
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