In an article published in the New York times, myspace has agreed with attorneys general "in 49 states to take new steps to protect children from sexual predators on its site." It will also develop new technology to help verify ages and identities of Internet users.
I applaud the steps they are taking to protect children against predators seeking them out on the site but I question what methods they will be using to secure the identities of the Internet users. I wonder what kind of information will be harvested and what will be done with this information. While I won't argue that there are sexual predators out there stalking children on myspace, there are also thousands of people who use the site for communicating with friends for legitimate reasons. I don't want my information harvested to only be compromised later on. I fear that when this information gets stored, it can be passed off to something else for "security reasons" and my information is floating around in cyberspace for anyone to fish out.
According to Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Attorney General, the steps in the new agreement will "separate children's profiles from those of adults and to seek ways to verify users ages." Myspace will also lead a task force to find ways to verify ages and online identities and report their finding back to the attorneys general.
Myspace plans to install safeguards that would "require an adult user to prove that he or she knows the child user in order to contact that child, for instance by typing in an address or phone number." This will work great if children are honest about their ages, addresses, and phone numbers when they set up accounts. That's one of the draws to using an Internet profile, you can be whoever you want. I'm not sure all these safeguards will be as effective as they hope they will. I think the best course of action is still for parents to TALK to their children about Internet usage, sexual predators, online environments, and social networking. Having open communication between children and parents is one way to help safeguard children from Internet harm.
2 comments:
It will be interesting to see how this all works out. People are so fearful of the Internet and unseen predators that they look for a technological solution instead of sitting down and educating their kids.
I agree with you. I'm on MySpace and I have my profile set to private because I don't want people that I don't know to have info about me. I know that on some accounts (my 13 year-old-cousin for example) you have to know either the person's e-mail address or their last name before it lets you request them as a friend. This is a good measure, but it's not used by all. It will be hard to varify someone's true age and identity, expecially when some younger people want to appear to be older than they really are just to get at different people.
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