Harry Day stamps his feet over at the Groan. I don’t know how old Harry is, but the style of the piece suggests not very – about the right level of maturity for Guardianesque thinking, in fact. He tells us that his sister is very technologically competent:
My seven-year-old sister Lily is scarily competent with technology; she can change my phone’s screensaver, send a text message and download apps.
Oh, wow! Actually, given that these things are remarkably simple, I am not surprised a seven year old can manage it. However, there is, as Harry reminds us, a dark side to all of this, which is his point:
The flipside to this is that she is also a target for the games industry. It is easy to see why, considering she recently racked up a £200 bill feeding an imaginary animal apples and seeds on a supposedly free iPad app.
She did this, apparently by entering her father’s iTunes password, that he had foolishly allowed her to see. So, me being me, I’d blame the parents. Not so, Harry, it’s those evil corporations you see. Okay, so this particular game does seem a bit like rampant profiteering at the expense of the gullible, but then, there’s sharks out in that ocean and it is up to us to swim past a great distance. In this case, it is up to the parents to make sure their children do not have access to their password if they don’t want their bank account inadvertently raided. Personal responsibility, see? Otherwise all sorts of con merchants will be queuing up to take their slice of the pie.
Harry has some growing up to do. I’d suggest that he does it before he pens another risible article for a national daily.
You have to ask whether Harry’s dad is a moron for not checking the emails from iTunes advising him of the game app purchases?
I think the moron charge pretty much goes without saying. It doesn’t help when his son is writing in the Groan to advertise the fact either.
If they are Groan readers they are probably quite proud of the little twerp.
Grauniad reader an idiot, Graun reader blames industry.
Soon they will be referring to “Big Game” to describe these monstrously evil merchants of, er, Fun.
What do you expect at the Guardian? It allows Toynbee to go into print.
It astounds me the number of people who regard their passwords as just some sort of inconvenience, to be shared around as much as possible so as to make life “easier”.
Practically everyone I know just logs on to their partners or their childrens’ (and presumably the children to their parents’ ) email accounts, Facebook pages, and everything else just willy-nilly and without considering the consequences at all. Maybe they make an exception for their e-banking accounts but I wouldn’t bank (sorry) on it.
Then they get bitten on the bum and suddenly it’s someone else’s fault and Nanny State should “do something, waaaahhhh”.
The sympathy meter is reading zero. In my house we respect each others’ privacy – it’s a consequence of (a) boarding school and (b) a lifetime of IT support work.