(social malware) yaari.com
A "little girl" I know, whom I have a lot of affection for, sent me an invite to join "yaari.com".
Now, I probably receive about a dozen of these in a month, for all sorts of sites, from all sorts of people, and so far I have just shift-deleted them. (The only one I am a member of is LinkedIn, which is quite different in intent and target membership).
However, this friend is special enough that I wanted to at least consider joining, just for her sake. So I clicked on the link and came to the signup page. The signup page lists, on the right side, the "Top 5 Reasons to join Yaari", which are:
- It´s India´s safest social network
- Meet cool people
- Girl gossip
- Play fun games
- Watch Bollywood
My first thought was, if these are their "top" reasons, I wonder what the bottom ones are!
I'm particularly worried about the first reason -- I question the "safety" of anything that registers members without asking their age, leave alone ensuring their parents are informed!
In contrast, the Mattel site (I think) does this: they ask the child to provide a parent's email address and then they send a confirmation email to the parent. This doesn't prevent the child from **knowingly** doing something stupid, but for most normal kids this is quite sufficient.
[ And don't tell me yaari isn't targeted at young girls; look at reason #3 :-) ]
2 comments:
Actually I am not sure how asking for a parent's e-mail id can make a membership "safe" for a child.
Firstly, for a "child" there is no date of birth verification to establish that it is a child blogger and so "adult" stuff should not be transacted - either from or to the child!
And secondly, even if e-mail id of the parent is asked and a confirmation e-mail is received from that id, how is it established that the parent's e-mail id is that of the "parent" of the child under consideration.
I may be letting out a secret here (to potential child bloggers who see your blog) - but then my curiosity overcame the risk of a child potentially fooling a blogspot to get membership.
Incidentally, is your invitee to yaari.com known to me also?...SK
I said "for normal kids" it's sufficient. My daughter put in her real age in, and then came and asked me "dad what is you email address" and put that in. Before the membership was OK'd, they sent me an email.
It isn't foolproof if the kid **wants** to be a fool :-) But that is not possible to stop without asking for a real age proof anyway so it's too much hassle...
Sita
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