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MySpace announced yesterday that in their on-going effort to crack down on child predators within their network, they will be barring anyone older than 68 years old from registering within MySpace. I know you might be thinking, how does stopping someone older than 68 help underage users? According to Hemanshu Nigam, CSO of Fox Interactive Media, which owns the social networking site, many underage users were registering their ages as 69 years old (referring to the sexual position). This allowed them not to have a private profile and older users caught onto this practice and began searching for users 69 years of age.
I am torn when it comes to underage users within these networks. I do believe it is the responsibility of MySpace and all the other networks to build in safeguards to help protect underage users. Though with something like this age thing, underage users will just choose a new age under 68 and eventually that will catch on and older scum bags will begin searching for that age. As I said, the networks need to have safeguards, but when it comes down to it, it is the underage users parents who are responsible for knowing and monitoring what their children are doing on the web. It is an impossibility to expect MySpace or anyone else on the web to police their children.
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Technorati Tags: child predators, MySpace
This is one of those “see, we did something” things that companies (and governments) do to dodge criticism when they know as well as anyone else that it is not going to do anything to solve the underlying problem.
There is and will never be a replacement for good parenting. If you have a serious concern about your children being the victims of an online sexual predator, educate them, help them to know the dangers and how to deal with them.
Do not, blame the internet. Before MySpace it was chat rooms, before that it was playgrounds. Back then, people taught their kids not to talk to strangers, what to do if a strange person approaches them and other rules for existing out in the real world.
Now-a-days, parents use computers as pacifiers and don’t spend the time to inform their children about the rules or the online world.
If your child can’t understand how to be safe online, don’t let them online. It’s no different then when they leave through the front door.
Anyway, MySpace isn’t going to solve the problem and the fact that they have made this modification is moderately retarded. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that this change makes their children safer when using MySpace is completely retarded.
Adam back on his soap box where he belongs..
I totally agree with Adam. You know the only reason MySpace is doing this is so they can say they have done all this during the next run of lawsuits they get. I agree with you that it all comes down to the parents responsibility, the problem with that is a great deal of parents are not living up to these responsibilities. Though I guess that is a much greater discussion. Thanks as always for your thoughts.
This is a shame cuz was really looking forward to Chris Hanson from To Catch A Predator to start an online Dateline to go after these idiots online.
All jokes aside…this is finally some good news to come out to the online world.
Child predators are pretty disgusting - of all the criminals in the world, these are the types that still give me chills at 29 years old.
In the end I agree with Adam, I don’t think this change will make any difference.
I came from a family who strongly believed in teaching their children how to handle themselves yet always kept a watchful eye on what we were doing or who our friends were. I was also taught to NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS. I know these things get blurred as more and more kids are being brought up online but I think the principle of these ideas still remains true.
On MySpace - friend your friends and don’t talk to strangers (when your young - when your older, spam for popularity). Unfortunately perverts aren’t going away and I don’t want to get all 1984 on our asses in order to preemptively catch these dudes. So parents (unfortunately) will need to do a lot of the heavy lifting to cure MySpace (and others) of their pervert problem.
How do you know the 69 year-old wasn’t someone genuine and is looking for a partner?
What right has YouTube or anybody else to play at social engineering or God?
(Tech Mentat, your point about “don’t speak to strangers” leads to rubbish networking skills and poor self-esteem in later life).
Jeremy… you’re right that not speaking to strangers leads to rubbish networking skills and poor self-esteem in later life. God are you so right…
(slowly turns off laptop and ponders his lifelong loneliness & solitude)
Jeremy, I think the point of the article was according to MySpace (not YouTube) there were no 69 year olds on the site and they were all underage kids. More importantly, MySpace, YouTube and every other social network has every right to social engineer anything they want when it comes to underage kids and predators on their network because at the end of the day they are going to be held partially responsible if something bad happens in the offline world. I don’t agree with that, but we have already seen lawsuits and bad press come MySpace’s way because of underage kids meeting adults in real life after they met on MySpace.