SPECIAL NOTICE TO CHILDREN

[steuard]

I'm creating an account to download instructor resources from the Pearson Education website. Along the way, I was presented with their Privacy Policy and License Agreement. Unlike practically every sane human being on the planet, I actually read the things before clicking "I agree". (This may be residual anxiety from Dilbert's fate many years ago.)

On the sixth page of the privacy policy (in its little scrolling text area), after paragraph after paragraph of dry text about The Use of Personal Identifying Information for Legitimate Business Purposes, I found the following gem:

SPECIAL NOTICE TO CHILDREN: Ask your parent or guardian for permission before you send any personal information over the Internet.

Why is this there? What could possibly have motivated them to include a "special notice to children" in a place where no actual human child will ever actually see it? It's not as if this somehow gives them legal cover of any kind: it's phrased as advice, and its intended audience is (apparently) children. There's something fundamentally skewed about the mindset that would think this was a useful thing.

While I'm at it, the authors of this privacy policy really have it in for Canadians, too. At the very end of the privacy policy (page seven), after you've slogged through all of that dry legal text, you read "SPECIAL NOTICE TO CUSTOMERS OF PEARSON CANADA: Pearson Canada's specific privacy policy, rather than the above privacy policy, applies to Pearson Canada's customers." Jerks!