- LONDON (Reuters) - Children growing up in the United States watch an
average of 8,000 murders each on television before leaving elementary school
and more should be done to protect them, a U.S. congressman said Tuesday.
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- Children should also be shielded from
unscrupulous marketers in cyberspace who are able to build up profiles
of them, Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, told an international
conference on children's television. Markey introduced the ``V-chip'' law
that will allow parents to use a silicon chip to help control what their
children watch on television.
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- ``Families are ready for this type of
assistance,'' he told the conference, which has attracted more than 1,000
broadcasters from around the world. ``The average American child watches
8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence by the time he or she leaves
elementary school. It is an appalling statistic.'' Markey, the senior Democrat
on the House of Representatives telecommunications committee, said much
of that viewing time was unfortunately not supervised. ``America is a nation
of working parents. We have eight million latchkey children. We have 18
million single parents,'' he said.
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- The 1996 U.S. Telecommunications Act
requires all television sets to have a V-chip. Owners of sets equipped
with V-chips will be able automatically to block out channels carrying
a certain rating. Markey has also helped to pass bills that cut the advertising
time on children's television programming and helped to limit so-called
dial-a-porn services.
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- ``In just two days, Thursday, the era
of the V-chip officially begins when the regulators approve a set of V-chip
technical standards and industry-sponsored ratings,'' he said. ``So we
are making progress in helping parents reduce programming they think harms
their children,'' he added. Markey would like to turn his legislative hand
next to ensuring more privacy on the information superhighway -- especially
for children.
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- ``Today's Big Brother is often totally
anonymous and targets children by engaging them in online games that tease
out their name, their age and other private information about their wants
and wishes that is then digested by a digital demographer and used to sell
new products.''
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- He has proposed the concept of a privacy
bill of rights for cyberspace so that no information can be collated without
the recipient knowing about it. Every user must have the right to say No,
he said.
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- ``Hijacking personal information is a
problem for adults and kids but it is particularly troubling when kids
are the target,'' he told the conference. Markey said it was vital to stop
marketers ``sneaking corporate hands into a personal information 'cookie
jar' and use this database to compile sophisticated, highly personal consumer
profiles.
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