Fruit Gushers Firefly Phone Giveaway Privacy Concerns
My kids have been bugging me to help them register to win 5 Firefly cell phones through the Fruit Gushers Phone-a-Day Giveaway.
In case you’re not familiar with the Firefly phone, its basically designed specifically for kids. Up to 20 phone numbers can be entered into it by a parent, and calls from numbers not in the phone’s memory are rejected. The phone also has buttons to call Mom and Dad directly. While my kids don’t need a cell phone, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to enter the contest once to appease the kids. Hopefully they won’t win.
That’s where things started to get interesting.
The first thing the site wanted was a birthday. I’m one to be careful about giving up information on the internets, so that made me leery right away. I put in my birthday instead. The form rejected my entry saying I was not 8 to 14, which is the age they expected. I won’t get into the usability of having all the years in the dropdown if most weren’t applicable. Instead, I thought about my options. To get past the screen I did end up putting in my eldest son’s birthday. I thought I’d see what was on the other side and could always cancel the registration.
The next screen was even worse.
First off, the title of the page: “Give Us All the Gooey Details on You”. Nice. Fortunately, at this point they only ask for a first name. I was also glad to see that they required a parent’s email address for verification purposes for prizewinners. But they still wanted an email for the registering child.
For both the email addresses, I entered one of my throw-away email addresses. The problem is the form requires two different email addresses in the fields. I’m giving General Mills the benefit of the doubt: they are making sure a kid doesn’t register without a parent involved, but they have excluded a big gap: kids without email addresses.
Our kids do not have email addresses. The Wife and I have worked hard to help them understand that the Internet is a very useful place, but there are also people on the web with nefarious goals. I am by no means a Luddite – I’m a web developer and spend 10 hours a day on the Internet. I email, build websites, blog and use instant messaging. I just want my kids to cautiously approach the great big world and that includes the Internet. Kids grow up too fast these days. So far, our eldest has not even asked about getting an email address, or a phone for that matter.
It still concerns me that General Mills is collecting email addresses of children independent of their parents. Their privacy policy would seem to indicate they would not use the email address for anything else, but I’m not comfortable with that. The bottom line:
Our kids won’t be winning any Firefly phones.
One Comment
- Michelle Uhri said: