MySpace cadets: how safe are they?
I recently filed an article for SunSentinel.com about MySpace safety. Here's how it started:
Do you know who all your kids' friends are? Do your kids know?Attorney General Bill McCollum is betting they don't, and that's just one of the challenges parents and children face when it comes to Internet safety.
"I go into a school and ask a class full of children whether they have MySpace pages," McCollum said. "They all have them, from sixth grade up. And I've never been to a school where there wasn't at least one student with more than 400 'friends.'"
Parents and children need to view friend lists on social networking sites with suspicion, McCollum said. "They call these people friends, but they don't know them."
Read the rest of the article here.
I'm a little bit worried about the amount of time our girls spend on MySpace, but mostly grateful that they both had the wisdom to set their pages to private so that they can only be viewed by their friends. The real issue, as far as I see it, is the fact that they have hundreds of MySpace friends.
McCollum's warning struck a chord with me as a parent, and I remember asking the girls if they personally knew everyone on their friend list. They insisted they did, but I have a confession: I didn't follow through. I didn't sit with them and go through their list, profile by profile, to make sure they knew everyone they were befriending. Should I? Would you?
I did want to pass on something helpful I stumbled on: The Kim Komando radio show put up a decent MySpace dummy page showing potential safety issues raised by the posting of private information. If you click on that banner above, it'll open that site in a new window. You may be surprised at how easy it is for your kids to post information that makes them vulnerable.
There's something else on that site, too: a "Ten Commandments" for kids online. It has you and your kids promising communication and cooperation when it comes to Web surfing.
Novel concept.
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