Protecting children's privacy in virtual-world games: The threats of smart advertising

• Author: Lesley A. Jacobs
• Pages: 63-91

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#chapter4

PROTECTING CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

IN VIRTUALWORLD GAMES:

THE THREATS OF SMART ADVERTISING

A. INTRODUCTION

In the everyday lives of children today, playing virtual-world games is one

of the most visible contrasts to the childhood act ivities of their parents or

grandparents. Virtua l-world games provide children with digita l spaces

for experimentation and play where they can create identities and fulll

roles that may be an authentic reection of who they really are — or a mere

invention. ey enable children to live virtual ly in one or many worlds.

Virtual worlds are “places of imagination that encompass practices of play,

performance, creativity, and ritual.” e global digital economy has cap-

italized on the market for vi rtual-world games for both children and adults.

However, unlike social networks such as Facebook, which are built on busi-

ness models that commodify di rectly the personal information, truthful or

otherwise, that users post, the economic success of virtual-world games is

not tied directly to the personal i nformation that players share in the name

of friendship or connectivity (the focus of Chapter ). is dierence has

greatly complicated the issue of privacy protection in virt ual-world games.

It is not, for example, clear which user identity — the real or the virtual

— should be protected. Moreover, in the case of children, it is dicult to

decide how much weight to give to paternalistic concerns about limiting

choices in order to protect privacy interests when children have grown up.

is chapter examines paths to civil justice for privacy rights protection

for children and youth while playing vir tual-world games. In Chapter , the

focus was on the perils of friendship in t he global digital economy where a

 Tom Boellstor et al, Vir tual Worlds and Ethnography: A Handbo ok of Method (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton Universit y Press, ) at .

Privacy Rights in th e Global Digital Economy64 |

network of virtual f riendships has become a site for entrepreneurship and

commercial success. Here, the focus is on the dangers of smart advert ising.

Whatever status smart advertisers have, it is not a relationship of friend-

ship with the player of the virtual-world game. Instead of emphasizing the

importance and value of self-regulation and private consumer complaint

forums as paths to civil just ice, the argument here is that regulation of smart

advertising directed at children should be modelled on the sort of regula-

tion that already exists for e-nance.

B. THE VIRTUAL WORLDS OF CHILDREN

Video games for children using digital platforms have been around since

the early s. ey dier, however, from virtua l-world games in that video

games provide environments where players can enter and interact with ob-

jects whereas virtu al worlds are all about players creating the environment.

Virtual-world games possess all t he characteristics of video games — con-

trolling avatars in an i nteractive, multi-player, D, vivid virt ual environment

— in addition to possible interactivity with t he virtual envi ronment that is

persistent and dynamic, and contains economic/consumer aspects. Jacob

Rogers argues that the most prominent dierence between virtual-world

and video games is that virtual worlds are both persistent and dynamic.

Even when a player is not in the virtual world, the vir tual environment con-

tinues to exist and change over time. It should be acknowledged, however,

that the persistence distinction between video games and virtua l worlds is

true only for video games without an onli ne multi-player feature. Call of

Duty, for example, does have an online multi-player feature. In this sense,

online video games are persistent like v irtual worlds but not dynamic.

In her book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How

ey Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal notes that collectively, human

beings have spent more than y billion hours — six mi llion years — playing

the virtua l-world game World of Warcra, the same amount of time we

have been evolving as a species. e number of people globally playing

virtua l-world games broke one billion in : roughly half of them were

 Jacob Rogers, “A Passive Approach to Regulation of Vir tual Worlds” () : Geo

Wash L Rev .

 Gregory Lastowk a & Dan Hunter, “e Laws of the Virt ual Worlds” () : Cal L Rev

 at .

 Jane McGonigal, Realit y Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Be tter and How ey Can

Change the World (New York: Penguin Pre ss, ) at .