Daily Times

Sir: As children prefer to spend long hours on internet-enabled devices, they are becoming substantial contributors to the online environment, games and communities.

This progressive development on the internet has revolutionised technology and simplified tasks. However, using applications online has opened legal issues on ownership and privacy amongst those from the legal and computer science community and those involved in policy making. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus are posing new challenges to privacy as people, unaware of the risks involved, put their personal data onto such websites.

Even children playing online games are exposed to a host of shrewd marketing mechanisms in the form of additional points and lives in return for filling up surveys and questionnaires, accepting cookies, etc. The information gathered is thus an efficient and cost effective form of extracting demographic patterns of knowledge, information and behaviour.

This directly creates issues of privacy, especially for the most vulnerable amongst us. Laws in Pakistan on data protection and privacy still remain in an embryonic stage and hence it would be difficult to attain relief in a court of law, if and when the need arose. Therefore it is imperative that online users remain alert and act diligently when parting with sensitive information and parents need to monitor the use of online technology by their children.

BARRISTER MOBEEN SHAH

Nottingham

UK