MySpace To Be Made Safer For Users 251
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad,' the Wall Street Journal reports. The good news: Traffic nearly doubled in the last half of last year. The bad news: MySpace is being criticized for exposing children to risqué content and sexual predators. In response, 'News Corp. plans to appoint a "safety czar" to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information."
Parents (Score:1, Insightful)
This just in... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wait...this was talked about almost ten years ago.
Re:responsible design (Score:5, Insightful)
Then disable them from hotlinking via http.conf or
We don't need legislation when a simple google search and a copy/paste would solve your issues.
Re:Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids think it'll never happen to them. Kidnapping, rape, murder...no matter how many times it happens to people who do the exact same things they do, kids tell themselves that it can't happen to them because they're smarter than that. They're in control. They don't understand that they are completely out of control, and they don't grasp the concept of consequences.
the world isnt that ugly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:responsible design (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest problem with myspace are all the users who think it's cool to customize your profile with all sorts of random useless crap like large background images, floating images, and ten video clips playing simultaneously.
Good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:responsible design (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, now that geocities is basically dead, the lamers had to go somewhere, right?
You let your little girl watch porn? (Score:3, Insightful)
Children should be supervised. Period. and if they're not then you should take whatever steps are necessary, including preventing access to friends who are a poor influence, you're the responsible adult after all.
Re:Shoot. (Score:3, Insightful)
My friend was on eharmony, and I showed her how easy it was to get people's info. I showed her how you could punch a first name, approx age and city into a site like intellius or zabasearch, and get a last name and an address. It freaked her out enough to where she dropped her subscription...
I have always thought it would be fun to call a news station during sweeps month and offer to show a reporter how easy it is to get full names and addys from eharmony or yahoo personals etc... for free. You can get a whole lot more info if you are willing to use a paid background check service.
Dont put anything on the internet you dont want others seeing....
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a radical concept..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. Won't work. Too much effort on their part.
Re:What do you mean exposing children to predators (Score:5, Insightful)
Myspace needs a discalimer that says "this site may be hazardous to your career"
There is a rash of mid twenties people on there, and they post risque pics and comments. And guess what, someone in your office, has checked out myspace looking for people from work. And although you may act professional and dress conservatively at work, those pics from myspace with you in your short skirt and hitting a bong will get passed around the office. And right or wrong, it will change people's perceptions of you....
Re:Parents (Score:3, Insightful)
At a very young age give your kids the upbringing to make their own informed decisions and they won't dissapoint you.
Perhaps I'm missing something.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Czar" has a double meaning (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, in the US govt there are appointed Drug Czars, Immigration Czars, Energy Czars, Education Czars, and a whole bunch of Czar's who oversee areas of policy that are not really meant to be improved, but still need to be shown as something that is being addressed and taken care of. Appointed Czar's usually have no power, very little budget, and are all show, appointed for the purpose of silencing and placating critics. The Czars don't actually have to "fix" anything, since the areas of policy that they're "put in charge of" are literally beyond fixing. They just have to show up to work and fight the good fight; in this way, the powers-that-be can say that they're doing something about the problem, while not actually having to allocate any significant resources to fix anything.
So, when MySpace (or any other company or organization) appoints a Czar to make everyone safer, take it with a grain of salt. Czar is code word for "fuck off, critics, you're in the way of higher profit and/or control over our subjects".
Just my $0.02
The dangers are real EVERYWHERE. (Score:5, Insightful)
And BTW, your FOAF story reeks of bullshit to me.
Ugh (Score:1, Insightful)
How about you start telling parents to raise their own freaking kids properly instead of pushing this crap off on the rest of us?
Personally, I don't give half a pitcher of warm spit about Myspace or the people who frequent it. Seems to me, though, that the problem of 13 year old girls either turning into emo train wrecks because it's 'cool' or flying to zimbabwe to meet sexual predators could be much more easily uprooted at the source.
That is, the 13 year old teenage girls.
Yes, all true, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
They're looking for the thrill. Kids are reckless. The kids that get in trouble on the internet are the same ones that would get in trouble at the mall or wherever. If they end up as drug-addicted sex slaves because of some chatroom troll, they'd probably end up there anyway with some dude they met at the local foodcourt. People don't like admitting that because it implies they're bad parents, so they run off and try to sterilize the entire world--and won't do a damned bit of good because it's a moving target. Teenagers are in it for the thrill. Remove it and both they and the predators will move somewhere else. Education is the only answer and, sadly, no matter how much you try to protect the children and control the adults that prey on them, many will still get into trouble.
Re:MySpace PSAs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Free Advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
so free advertising for MySpace targeted at their #1 demographic? See kids, MySpace is dangerous. Oooh
A better idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The dangers are real (Score:3, Insightful)
For starters, the only people who can view your profile are those who go to your school or you have explicitly listed as a friend. You can also choose to restrict access to your profile even further to people at your school you have listed as friends, etc.... Facebook takes it a step further by customizing who can see what. Rigt now, anybody can see my picture, musical tastes, and other generic information -- only friends can see anything personal beyond that (phone numbers, screen names, email addresses, etc.)
Likewise, facebook has a basic user-authentication scheme that prevents you from registering unless you have a university email account. It's not completely foolproof, but works well enough to block out virtually all online predators.
In the case of the student you mention, this means that the girl was either 'friends' with the assailant, or he went to the same school. In either case, that leaves him with plenty of other information sources to find her personal information.
I go to a tiny liberal arts college. Everybody knows everybody as it is. Anything on my facebook could easily be figured out from other public information sources (Campus Phonebook, etc...). In a large (20,000+) university, I could see that privacy might be an issue, but here, it simply isn't.
Likewise, facebook is a tad 'cleaner' than myspace by preventing users from using any sort of markup (HTML,CSS,Javascript, etc.) in their profiles.
Comparing facebook to myspace is like comparing apples to oranges. Anyone trying to stalk on facebook is wasting their time. Facebook is for networking with people you know (innocuous). Myspace is for meeting new people you've never met (sketch)