MySpaceSafetyTips.com

Wesley Fryer, in his Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog, wrote an interesting post about a new social networking related web service named "Meetro." Meetro promises to

"Let your friends know where you are by placing the badge on your myspace page, blog, or even your email signature... You know where you are, but does the rest of the world? Let 'em know! Enter your Meetro screenname in the box below and click the button to generate the HTML code needed for your blog, e-mail signature or Myspace page. The badge will display your current location or your last known where-abouts."

Our book, MySpace Safety: 51 Tips, has as its primary objective teaching parents and teens how to use MySpace.com safely. One of our major points (echoed elsewhere by more well-known Internet safety experts) is that in order for teens to maintain safety while using MySpace, care must be taken to disassociate the teen’s online presentation of themselves and location-specific information (such as where they live, zip code, what school they attend, etc.). A great many of our safety tips are precisely about how to do this within MySpace.

Meetro completely undoes everything most Internet safety experts advise for keeping teens safe from predators. Every neighborhood has people you’d never want your child to have contact with (just look at published sex offender registries if you have doubts). The last thing we need is a means for them to pinpoint which nearby teens are at home alone every afternoon.

An application like Meetro is fine for adults, but it significantly increases the risk to teens and children who are active online.

I think that internet safety is so important, especially if kids are on MySpace a lot they need to know how to be aware of what is going on and what not to post on their pages. A great resource to have on hand is Cybertipline. Its very informative and you can report any illegal activity anonymously.

Posted by Ashley on 21 August 2006 - 12:17