Mysteries, Chemtrails, Aerosols :: Mysterious NZ

[Melody Anderson]

The NZ Government yesterday launched its Mission On website yesterday. The site is aimed at 5 - 12 year olds to encourage them to get out and get active, by suggesting 'cool stuff' for them to do. The $3.5 million (!!) web site allows kids to create virtual characters and uses a 'passport' system to gather personal information that they volunteer eg. name, age, address and phone number, where they go to school, ideas, things they make, pretty much any personal information they want to contribute about themselves - also allowing them to 'make friends' and send messages in a similar manner to sites like Bebo and Facebook. Children can also earn points and win prizes, which makes providing a physical address and contact details necessary... :-k And they can earn extra points by telling a story or including a photo or video of what they did.

The site looks reasonably straightforward and apart from designing the 'cool' Flash technology based interactive elements etc, I wonder where all the money went. Perhaps in the back-end database, profiling and information-sharing side of things - maybe there is some kind of direct hookup to other Government Departments or provision at least for feeding into some kind of centralised computer system.
Their terms and conditions mention possible sharing of information with other government agencies and the site reassures 'worried parents' that the site is 100% safe and approved by the NZ Government. (phew, now I feel so much better ). Only their moderators can see your child's personal information.

The passport forms fields contain information that is almost exclusively seen only by moderators, except for the nickname chosen by the child. Interestingly ethnicity is one of the fields, along with parent or guardian's name, email address and phone number and the child's real name.

There have already been some questions about whether a social networking web site is the best way to encourage physical activity, but sports minister Clayton Cosgrove says "The overseas evidence shows that if you use something that's cool, it engages young people...If you can't beat 'em, you've got to join them".

[steve clougher]

so where and by whom, apart from MNZ, do these word-mincing parasites ever get challenged ?

can responsibility be traced to pollies or public servants ?

the next big battlefield is the information highway............at present , any tv or newspaper outlet can be railroaded by executives, and by temporary "consultants", without the public ever knowing who is blowing bulldust into their tiny minds

[steve clougher]

so where and by whom, apart from MNZ, do these word-mincing parasites ever get challenged ?

can responsibility be traced to pollies or public servants ?

the next big battlefield is the information highway............at present , any tv or newspaper outlet can be railroaded by executives, and by temporary "consultants", without the public ever knowing who is blowing bulldust into their tiny minds

[Melody Anderson]

Yes, but it's for the public good, steve... :)

Another thing I found interesting about the site. It seems that the only way to 'make friends' is to enter in the nickname of the person you want to 'make friends with' - there is no way to find friends or to browse other kids to 'make friends with' (probably to discourage online perverts). Or maybe because I didn't enter in any personal information, I wasn't introduced to any... The 'how-to' section mentions that you'll 'bump into' friends along the way....

So perhaps the 'making friends' option implies preknowledge of the nickname of the person you want to 'make friends with'.

Not so much making friends at all - but perhaps, more correctly, declaring your peer group...

I'd love to have seen the scope document for the web development team... It might go something like this:

******************************************************************************

Devise a social networking web site aimed at pre-teens to capture data from primary to secondary school-aged children

Find ways to encourage registrants to disclose personal and verifiable details including real names, contact addresses and numbers, email addresses, ethnicity and those of parents or guardians

Find ways to encourage registrants to disclose rich personal information about their activities and state of mind

Encourage registrants to declare peer group and associates

Devise a rewards scheme for the submission of additional material, including multimedia and photographic images

Devise a method of sharing/feeding submitted information, delivered to a centralised repository, amongst health officials, police and other government related and approved agencies for the purposes of profile-building and cross referencing

Cloak the web site's real purpose in something benign and positive eg. to fight the growing child obesity epidemic

******************************************************************************

[steve clougher]

exactly , Melody, then the next step is to correlate genetic info, and you've got, by stealth and deceit, an advanced version of what we saw in nazi Germany

let us watch our free internet, as if our lives depend on it..........they do