MySpace Finally Takes Steps to Protect Kids
MySpace takes a lot of heat for not doing enough to protect the younger members of its site. The site has repeatedly worked with governments to ban sexual offenders, but those efforts have always been reactive to external pressure and bad PR. Now the site is being a little more proactive, announcing a number of measures to help ensure the safety of under-age members.This includes a number of enhancements to the site, including the ability for parents to list the e-mail addresses of their children and prevent them from creating profiles, automatically marking under-age profiles as "private," and responding within 72-hours to any reports of inappropriate content on the site. The company hopes these measures will help to keep kids safe and, of course, keep angry parents off of their backs. But, we can't help but think these measures will be easy to subvert or abuse.
It would be a funny joke to list all your friends' e-mail addresses as your children and prevent them from using them to sign up on the site (assuming you have any friends who aren't already on there), but the bigger problem is that there's no way to prevent your kids from going to Hotmail or Gmail and getting another disposable e-mail account to sign up with. And there's still nothing preventing them from lying about their age to make a public profile.
Ultimately these changes are positive steps that should help to protect some of the untold thousands of underage MySpace users, but we believe that those who really want to will keep on finding ways around them.
From CNN
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
chloe @ Jan 15th 2008 3:26PM
It is a great news~! Kids get too much adults content on mypace!@
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John @ Jan 15th 2008 9:04PM
It's about time! As a minister, I've seen kids get in deep trouble over MySpace. It is too little and too late, however, and an intelligent parent will block their kids from signing up, especially since, with the Internet "Way Back" site, you can see everything from the past back to 1997 just as it was on the web at that time.
DALE JR GIRL 88 @ Jan 18th 2008 9:10PM
I HAVE A GROUP ON MY SPACE CALLED COBRA HEAT 2 AND WE TRY TO PROTECT KIDS FROM PREVERTS. JUST LIKE ON www.tagged.com WE HAVE A GROUP THAT PROTECTS KIDS AND PEOPLE FROM PERVERTS AND NASTY PROFILES WITH NUDITY ON THEM. GOOD THING MY SPACE IS DOING SOMETHING THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH WE AS COBRA HEAT2 CAN DO.
Danielle @ Mar 3rd 2008 12:27AM
ok...how is making an underaged profile private helping at all? whether its private or public ANY 1 can still get to the home page and request you as a friend, and seeing how myspace is "a place to meet friends" all they have to do is accept the request and they're no longer private to that person nemore.