MySpaceSafetyTips.com

MySpaceSafetyTips.com is on its way back. As you may have noticed, our site has been offline. Our previous blogging software was infiltrated by spammers, so we took down the site and searched for a better solution. We think we've found that, and now we're working to bring the site back.

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 Connecticut State legislature is working on a bill that would require social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to verify users' ages and get parental permission before minors could post profiles, according to an article titled "Internet Safety Is Goal of Bill" in the Hartford Courant on March 9, 2007.

Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who chairs a 45-member national task force of attorneys general studing the issue of Internet safety, said:

"Connecticut now has the opportunity to be out at the forefront of a proactive movement to protect our children from the perils of a social networking site."

The law would require the social networking sites to cross-check personal information -- such as name, birth date, and address -- to see if it matches existing public records, according to Blumenthal. Parental permission might involve downloading a form, filling it out and mailing it to the site.

Our View

With respect to MySpace.com, anyone who has ever attempted to contact their customer service with a unique question knows that the personnel infrastructure to handle individual queries simply doesn't exist. To implement the requirements of the law, MySpace would need to hire many more employees to handle the burden of verification.

It is questionable whether the MySpace business model could support the added expenses that the law would require. Of course, that's no reason to let them off the hook. As we stated in our book, it's quite clear that MySpace disregarded safety during its early years, when all that mattered was gaining more users and becoming the largest social network site.

Since the buy out by News Corp., many safety measures have been implemented, including allowing any MySpace member to have a private profile. In addition, surveys have shown that teens themselves have become more savvy about online safety. And, parents are indeed more aware of what is happening and what's possible with respect to their teens being online.

So, the question is: can a law really have a positive effect? Given that college students can start a social networking site during Spring Break, can legislation that focuses on the big players really have a meaningful effect?

An Advantage of the Legislation

One advantage of the legislation is that it would make it difficult for predators to pretend to be teens. This was the starting point for many of the situations where teens were lured into meetings with older men, who they thought were teen boys. If you're going to claim to be a teen minor, you'll have to get your parents' permission to create your profile. A much older would-be predator will find this a difficult obstacle to overcome.

In Connecticut alone, six alleged assaults involving older men and younger girls who met through MySpace were investigated last year.

Blumenthal says that age monitoring is achievable through the use of software that is readily available and increasingly affordable. The software is currently used by alcohol and tobacco companies, as well as credit card companies.

MySpace's View

MySpace Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said that MySpace is committed to protecting teens online but does not believe the proposed Connecticut law is the best way to do it:

"The most cost-effective means to protect teens online is through a combined approach involving features and tools to make our site safer, educating our users and their parents, and working collaboratively with online safety organizations and companies. We have and will continue to focus considerable resources on developing effective ways to make our site safer. Attorney General Blumenthal's proposal, while well intentioned, is not the answer."

Blumenthal counters with the excellent point that the state is simply asking the networking sites to enforce the terms of service they have now. If you read the MySpace terms of service, you will find that it is illegal to enter an incorrect birth date when you sign up. When we were writing our book, we found the fact that you can edit your birth date when it's illegal to have an incorrect birth date quite telling: the terms of service imply that security is a key interest of the site, but the practical implementation of the site implies that no one at MySpace cares what age you want to claim you are. Which is a big part of the problem.

Can Legislation Solve the Problem?

The Connecticut legislation challenges social networking sites to live up to what they promise in their stated terms of service. What happens if the sites refuse? Can Connecticut ban MySpace? Even China and Iran have difficulty banning Web access.

As we argued in our book -- you cannot protect teens who don't want to be protected from risk. Those who do care have likely become much more aware of the risks that exist on the Internet, through books like ours, newspaper articles, news on television, etc.

We ended "MySpace Safety: 51 Tips" with the following statement:

Some day, we hope, a book like this won't be necessary. Then sites like MySpace won't be in the headlines anymore. Society will have adjusted to Internet communication and virtual interaction as a part of everyday life, and a working set of safe practices will be understood by all, and appear as obvious as "Don't step in front of an onrushing bus."

We're not all the way there yet -- but in the past year, since we wrote our book, a lot of progress has been made. Teens and parents understand a lot more about the risks of social networking sites. Online safety gets attention in schools and elsewhere. That teens are online is no longer a big secret.

The Connecticut law has a good intent -- if a site says it's illegal to enter an incorrect age, they should enforce that. They don't. Hence, the "you must enter your true age" statements of sites like MySpace are meaningless.

But we don't see the law increasing safety significantly. The Internet is a wide open place. Teens who don't want to have to involve their parents in verifying their age will simply go to other sites, they'll go into an even deeper hiding from both their parents and the State. In our view, a law isn't going to help protect that particular group of high-risk teens; yet they are surely the ones for whom the freedom afforded by the Internet poses the greatest danger today.

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.

The recent Pew Internet report, titled "Social Networking and Teens: An Overview" suggests that the effort to educate teens about online safety is succeeding. A key finding of the study was that 66% of teens who have a profile on a social networking site have set their profile to private. In addition, only 13% of older (15-17 years old) girls use their social networking site for flirting (29% of older boys flirt online).

This is great news for the teens themselves, and should set parents' minds more at ease as well. The nature of the Internet, and the risks entailed through publishing a completely public online presence, are now well understood by most teens.

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.