T.O.T, what yall know about this ?Internet friend-group sites

[Sauce-Head]

MySpace Takes Steps to Protect Young Users
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP


The case of Katherine Lester, 16, who flew to the Mideast to be with a man she met on MySpace, is just the latest to highlight safety concerns about the site.


NEW YORK (June 21) - MySpace.com is planning new restrictions on how adults may contact its younger users in response to growing concerns about the safety of teenagers who frequent the popular online social networking site.

The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts and displays only partial profiles for those registered as 14 or 15 years old unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teen's list of friends.

Under the changes, announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's friends' list unless they already know either the youth's e-mail address or full name.

Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth's list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over.

However, users under 18 can still make such contact, and MySpace has no mechanism for verifying that users submit their true age when registering. That means adults can sign up as teens and request to join a 14-year-old's list of friends, which would enable the full profiles.

The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has grown astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. The site currently has some 87 million users, about a quarter registered as minors, according to the company.

At MySpace, which was bought last year by News Corp. for $580 million, users can expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.

It offers a mix of features - message boards, games, Web journals - designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages.

MySpace has recently become a target of parents, schools and law enforcement officials concerned that teens who hang out at MySpace can fall victim to sexual predators.

Just this week, a 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old user sued MySpace and News Corp., seeking $30 million in damages. And earlier this month, a 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport flew to the Mideast to be with a 20-year-old man she met through MySpace. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded the teen to turn around and go home.

MySpace officials say the new restrictions have been long planned and are unrelated to recent events.

Besides the contact restrictions, all users - not just those 14 and 15 - will have the option to make only partial profiles available to those not already on their friends list.

All users also will get an option to prevent contact from people outside their age group. Currently, they may only choose to require that a person know their e-mail or last name first; that will remain an option to those 16 and over, even as it becomes mandatory for those younger.

MySpace also will beef up its ad-targeting technology, so that it can avoid displaying gambling and other adult-themed sites on minors' profile pages and target special public-service announcements to them.

The changes follow a number of safety-related measures that includes the hiring of a former federal prosecutor and Microsoft Corp. executive as its online safety chief. MySpace already has developed safety tips for parents and children and devotes scores of employees to monitoring the site around the clock.


06/21/06 03:45 EDT


Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.




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Why mom enlisted an online sleuth to keep tabs on child
By Daniel B. Wood | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

LOS ANGELES - Author Vicki Courtney in Texas keeps close tabs on her 13-year-old son, Hayden, by monitoring his instant messages (IMs) from a computer in the next room. Sometimes Hayden knows. Sometimes he doesn't.
Carolina Aitken, a mom in Santa Rosa, Calif., took her two teenage sons on the Dr. Phil show after she exposed their Internet misuse. She had contacted them via e-mail as "Candy Sweetness," a fictitious 16-year-old girl, to see if she could get them to give up their home phone number. One did.

In the Monitor
Wednesday, 06/21/06


A mother in State College, Pa., who asked to remain anonymous because she's embarrassed by her Internet naiveté, recruited a techno-savvy friend to search for unpublished Web log addresses of her 12-year-old daughter. The friend found the girl posing as an 18-year-old on MySpace.com, a social-networking site for teens.

Amid hand-wringing over the increasing sophistication of online sexual predators, financial scammers, and other cyber-solicitors, more moms and dads are resolving to become their children's "Big Brothers" - in both the collegial and the Orwellian sense, but too few parents are doing as much as they should, Internet experts say.

"A larger percentage of parents are getting involved in ways to advise, watch over and even control what their kids are doing," says Ken Colburn, founder and president of Data Doctors Computer Services, a nationwide computer service, which also publishes warning signs to identify net-addicted teens, safety tips, parental advice, and family contracts for Internet use. "But that involvement is still not anywhere close to where it needs to be."

Officials say 750,000 sexual predators have been identified on the Web. One in five children between grades 7 and 11 has been contacted on the Web by someone asking to meet, according to Rob Nickel, author of "Staying Safe in a Wired World: A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety."

"Internet predators haven't changed over the years, but what has changed are the ways they can contact and infiltrate through cellphones, IMs, blogs, social websites and a number of other Internet tools," says Mr. Colburn.

Generally, parents are not as involved partly because of the rise of two-income families (i.e. two absent parents) as well as the increased number of computers and child-owned cellphones per household, and the technological generation gap that has kept cyber-sophisticated children light-years ahead of their techno-befuddled guardians.

But now, more are beginning to recognize the dangers of such neglect. Using an array of new monitoring, blocking, and filtering technology, they are more determined to protect their kids from the consequences they have seen in the media.

Just last week, the FBI released a story of a 16-year-old girl in Michigan who flew to the Middle East to meet a man in the West Bank that she came to know on MySpace.com.

"Parents are waking up because there are more and more stories where a family friend or inner circle member has been affected," says Colburn. "Parents are realizing, hey, if that can happen to them, maybe it can happen to us, too."

To keep up with technology's onslaught of new lures, moms and dads are trying everything from a fresh dose of familial heart-to-hearts (including written contracts of computer rules) to stealth software that can pinpoint every keystroke, e-mail, pop-up ad, and website visited on their children's laptops.

Ms. Courtney put two kinds of protection on her family's three computers to monitor her three children. One, SafeEyes, costs $60 from Safebrowse.com, and requires 13-year-old Hayden to plug in a special password, and then limits his Internet access - those he contacts and those who contact him - based on categories Ms. Courtney chose from a long list including ways to limit sexual content, words, language, and gambling.

She also customizes his daily and weekly hours on the computer, occasionally cutting him off when she is away on weekends or has gone to bed.

"Sometimes I hear these bloodcurdling screams from the next room when the computer has cut him off in the middle of a game," says Courtney.

A second software, called eBlaster, documents every keystroke, IM, e-mail, and website visited on the computer her 16- and 18-year-olds use. Courtney can get a log of the day's activities or watch online activity in real time, with a slight delay.

About a year ago, she was watching as a young girl sent Hayden an obscene phrase and link to a sexual website.

"I was watching this all from the next room and holding my breath, and then he didn't click on it," recalls Courtney. She praised him for doing the right thing, but decided to suspend his IM privileges because he could be vulnerable to such suggestions from online acquaintances.

"These put me in control, let me create the boundaries for each and change them at will," says Courtney. Her eldest son ribs her and her husband for "stalking his every move," but on Father's Day he thanked them for the rules that have kept him out of trouble.

Houston computer software developer Larry Estes and his wife Lisa, who also have three kids (ages 11, 13, and 16), have placed monitoring technology on their computers. The family policy is "zero expectation of privacy" says Mr. Estes, and all computers are face out in an open room. "They can't hide what they are doing," he says.

The family has regular dinner discussions over the dangers of the Internet, including posting personal information, engaging in suggestive conversations, or writing commentary that could be screened by future employers.

"We feel education is the best form of control," says Estes. "If we tried to control everything, they would just go out and seek it somewhere else."

Brian Gibbs in Calgary, Alberta, says he blocks his 10-year-old stepson and 18-year-old foster son from accessing websites that are known as "hunting grounds" for predators. His older son has a "lack of impulse control and lack of understanding as to what is and is not appropriate (sexual conversation, etc.)," he says. He found a product called K9 Web Protection to monitor his use.

"I set my foster son up on the computer, and told him to look up every nasty thing he could possibly think of in every manner possible. I left him to it for about an hour. After this time, he came to me in my office to announce his results: zilch. He couldn't get anything. He was much less pleased than I was with this news. I was thrilled. Finally, a filtering application that is truly kid-proof," says Mr. Gibbs.

Many Internet watchers say that parental involvement with kids should go hand in hand with increased Internet monitoring. To help with this, some websites carry new technology and provide "Do's and Don'ts" lists for Internet safety.

"The point for now is that kids are both more savvy and sophisticated in using the Internet but still naive about the ways of the adult world," says Mr. Nickel.

[Don Seer]

dont they get it.. kids can lie about their age..

[Mr. O]

it's the kids fault...for lying..

and also...fuck the bitch's mom....
why the fuck would that girl fly out to mid-east

[51 cent]

I read about that thing, the girl was from Michigan, there was a follow up about how upset the guy she was supposed to go see is. I also read last week that MySpace is going to start being more strict - if you're over 18 you can't send a friend request to a minor unless you know their full email and full name - kids younger than 15 will only be able to display partial profiles to anyone outside their friends list.  There are still some loop holes, but it seems like the effort is there to keep kids safer, which is good b/c not all kids are watching out for themselves.  MySpace also partnered with Cybertipline to do PSAs awhile ago and make sure kids knew about resources and stuff - I think MySpace is doing the best they can.

[Eihtball]

Looks like another job for Killa Cam.

[Mr. O]

I think it's better without restriction.  Why? Because bitches need to learn from their own mistakes if something happens.
Without restriction, it's true people can haunt you and all that shit..but you can be smart enough not to take his bait and all that.

myspace should be life-learning experience...using your own as a demostration.

[No Compute]

I think people should just go outside and get real friends, pretty simple.

[Eihtball]

I think people should just go outside and get real friends, pretty simple.

I agree with that.  All of the people who waste so much time on these sites are pathetic...it's all just bullshit for people who don't know how to meet others face-to-face, so they do it online where it's easier.

The worst one is Facebook, IMO.  It was funny to me this past year when the entire '09 class got to campus and everyone was greeting people they didn't know, and when these people asked them "How do you know me?", these other people would say, "I have you on my Facebook friends list."

[51 cent]

I think these sites are here to stay and they shoudl get taught about in schools, etc.  Remember all that stranger danger stuff?  It seems like kids now don't think it's a problem if they're online, you're not invicible on there.