MySpace Homeland Security
CNN profiles complaints from safety experts who claim that the recently-installed security measures on the site aren’t enough to keep kids from being preyed upon by sexual predators.
Honestly, since when was it ever really possible to truly identify users with 100% accuracy and confidence? People are going to lie about their age, gender, name, weight, interests, etc… perhaps even more so than usual because of the extremely socially-oriented nature of the website. Hell, people don’t even give you their name or age with 100% honesty in reality… just go to any bar or club and pick five people at random. I’ve got $20 saying one of them fibs, for whatever reason. It’s just a LOT easier to do so online. Unless MySpace wants to restrict itself to US users and require something inane like your social security number to confirm your identity, there’s no realistic way MySpace is going to prevent people from lying about who they are.
Furthermore, since when was it MySpace’s responsibility to keep an eye on kids who may or may not have signed up with an assumed name, gender, or age? Sure, you can have all of the child safeguards and parental control mechanisms for underage users you want, but they all rely on kids a) having their parents’ permission and b) being honest about themselves when signing up for an account. Someone in Texas is suing the company for $30 million in damages because her daughter was sexually assaulted after meeting up with someone she found on MySpace. As horrible as that is, and as heartless as this next question may be, I have to ask, where was the mom and what was she doing to keep an eye on her daughter’s activities? Did she approve this meet-up, or did her daughter just go without telling anyone?
And the 16-year-old who flew to Jordan? Seriously, does it make any sense for some kid’s friend’s mom to organize a trip to Canada (which doesn’t require a passport, I might note, assuming you’re driving anyway) without calling the other parents to discuss it? And wouldn’t it also make just as much sense to want to discuss the trip with that kid’s friend’s parent before going to get your 16-year-old child a passport? (I’ll leave out the question of where the hell this girl got the money to buy a ticket to Jordan on the grounds that maybe the Jordanian guy bought it for her).
I really can’t help but think that, with as much as MySpace has been in the news lately - good and bad alike (though mostly bad) - parents would start taking a bit more of an interest in their children’s online activities and have a nice conversation on the general stupidity of blindly trusting folks you meet on the internet. In that respect, I have to say that it’s nice that I sort of “grew up” in a community online that seems to be pretty much devoid of deviant behavior like the aforementioned cases. It’s good to know that, should someone ever actually go missing for real at a meet-up like Mysterium, folks are willing to get the National Park Service rangers to go looking for you.
Anyway, ultimately, there’s a certain degree of responsibility on parents to make sure they know what’s going on, and as I will admit from first-hand experience that it’s easy enough to hide what you’re doing if you have your own computer, there’s something to be said for not letting underaged kids have unmonitored access to the internet, especially without a nice long chat about how dangerous places like MySpace could be. I think it’ll be interesting as our generation takes the parental reigns, because we pretty much know all of the tricks to pull to hide stuff, and hopefully we’re good at spotting those tricks too and can figure out ways of keeping our kids from getting around us.