MySpaceSafetyTips.com

Under pressure from 49 Attorneys General nationwide, MySpace has agreed to apply 74 new safety measures that will help protect younger users from online predators. As reported in the Hartford (CT) Courant:

In the coming months, 16- and 17-year-olds who create profiles on MySpace will see them automatically set to “private,” a default setting previously applied to 14- and 15-year-olds only. When a profile is set to private, no one can view it unless the creator of the profile allows them.

Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who personally thanked us for our effort in protecting children and young teens when we wrote MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents, said:

“This historic agreement is by no means the end. It is another step, a very promising step, toward establishing an industry gold standard. … It is our hope the entire industry will reach higher to keep kids safe.”

The Hartford Courant article goes on to say:

As part of the agreement, MySpace agreed to independent monitoring and to lead an Internet safety task force that will explore ways to make the Internet safer for all users, including the use of innovative age verification software. While the attorneys general say the existing software is sufficient to protect children, engineers at MySpace say it is flawed and are considering other options. The task force will file reports every three months and issue industry recommendations at the end of 2008.

In our view, this is a remarkable event, and signifies a recognition by MySpace that security for young people has long been lacking on the site.

Young people love MySpace because it’s a great place for expressing yourself and interacting with friends. It’s great news that MySpace will now take broader steps to ensure the safety of its young denizens.

MySpace’s latest effort to improve security against hackers and phishers has resulted in many, many users being locked out of their MySpace accounts, with no way to retrieve or change their password and get back in. Several people who have experienced this problem have posted comments to our post about the MySpace password retrieval page.

The blogger who runs the GhettoWebmaster.com site (not a big fan of MySpace when it comes to the technical quality of their product) gives an illustrated depiction of what’s happening in the post “MySpace inadvertently flagging accounts as phished”. Take a look at this if you’ve gotten the “Your account has been phished” message.

Fortunately, it appears that MySpace finally corrected this problem — or, at least the captcha image problem is fixed. If you were previously locked out, try resetting your password again. Now, you should be able to see the captcha and correctly enter it, to give yourself a new password.

The web site Mashable.com reports that MySpace is working on a new tracker that will enable parents to monitor what their teens are doing on MySpace. The article, titled “MySpace Tracker Tracks Teens”, describes the upcoming software, named Zephyr, as follows:

Zephyr allows parents to track the name, age and location their children have entered on MySpace, although it doesn’t let them view their child’s e-mail or view his or her profile page. Once the software is downloaded, it grabs this information for any user that logs on from that machine and saves it as a password protected file on the hard disk. It then notifies parents whenever the name, age or location on that profile is changed, even if it’s changed from another computer. It continues to work if the profile is private.

I’ll continue to watch for news about Zephyr and I’ll give it a test run when it becomes available.

This past week (November 7-9) I had a chance to hear Tom’s boss, the “Big Boss” of MySpace (Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media), speak at the Web 2.0 Summit. I posted a blog about it on my MySpace.com/OreillyMedia account, if you’re interested. Ross hopes that long-term members of MySpace have noticed big improvements in how the site works in the past year.

So I’m wondering what real MySpace users think about this: in your opinion, does the MySpace site work better than it did a year ago, or when you first joined MySpace?

Please let me know by responding to this from your MySpace account using email to me (MySpace profile MySpace.com/oreillymedia) or by adding a comment to my blog post.

I’m sure Ross Levinsohn will be interested in hearing what people think. I’ll tally the responses, and compose a message to Mr. Levinsohn that summarizes the results.

I encourage people to forward this message to all your MySpace friends. The more data we gather, the greater the likelihood that our message will be “heard” by Mr. Levinsohn and passed on to Tom.

If your MySpace password is phished and subsequently changed, you won’t be able to log into your MySpace account any more. This has happened to lots of people. Many of these people give up and create a new MySpace page, then try to find all of their old MySpace friends.

Thanks to the MySpace software developers, this is no longer necessary. MySpace has created a new password retrieval page, at URL:

http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.retrievepassword.

If your password has been stolen from you and changed, go to this page and enter the email address you use for logging into MySpace. Your current password will be sent to your email account.

Immediately after receiving the password message from MySpace, you should:

• log into your MySpace account using the current password
• go to your Account Settings
• select “Change Password”
• enter a new password that is very different from the password that was stolen