MySpace, Facebook attract online predators

This is very real! Watch the video, and find out what information your kids are publicly posting about themselves using SafetyWeb.



From NBC

Several times a day, Olivia Walker, a California high school sophomore, logs on to a Web site called MySpace.com to keep up with her friends.

“It's a way for them to instant-message,” Walker says, “or learn something more about somebody they didn't know previously.”

Walker is among the more than 40 million users of MySpace. Their postings are part diary, part photo album, with gossip, favorite music, pet peeves — sometimes even phone numbers and home addresses. And occassionally, revealing pictures.

“You can create relationships on MySpace,” Walker says, “or you can create friendships.”

It's a huge hit, too, at Newton North High School in Boston, where Andrew Crede is a junior.

“Pretty much most of the kids in my school use MySpace,” Crede says. “You put pictures up, you meet girls. You meet guys.”

But police nationwide warn that it's not just young people who are searching these immensely popular Web sites. They say potential sexual predators are, too.

A month ago, police in Connecticut arrested a 21-year-old man, accusing him of raping a 14-year-old girl he found on MySpace. On Long Island, investigators say another man found the work address of a 16-year-old girl on one of the Web sites last fall, lured her to a parking lot, and sexually assaulted her.

MySpace declined an on-camera interview but warns users never to post any personally identifiable information and says it's determined to provide a safe place for young people.

Facebook, a similar Web site, one especially popular with college students, says it blocks access to outside users not connected to a specific school.

“We protect the viewing of the profile to only students or other people with valid e-mail addresses from those universities,” says Facebook's Chris Daly.

Even so, middle and high school principals in Boston, like school administrator Judith Malone Neville, are warning parents to monitor what their children put online.

“They would be presenting themselves as potential prey for people who don't have good intentions at heart,” Malone says.

Police and school officials nationwide urge parents to remind their children that when they post their private thoughts online, strangers are definitely watching.

Warning Signs

All the protection in the world would mean nothing without the use of common sense and knowing what to look out for. Children 8 years old and even younger are getting online and into chat rooms, the places a predator might lurk. Contrary to what you may believe, boys and girls are both at risk! You absolutely cannot start teaching your kids Internet safety soon enough.

Predators specifically target children who are depressed, have few friends or other social problems, or have problems at home because they present vulnerabilities. You can't rectify any of those overnight, but working to help your child be happy and working problems out at home will definitely reduce your child's risk.

The first thing you should teach your kids about being safe online, is that predators sound like scary people. Take a look at some of the people at Family Watch Dog. You'll find that most look quite ordinary! Online predators have the added burden of needing to be very friendly, and they are... right up until meeting face-to-face and your child is isolated.

There is a basic time line of how a relationship between a predator and your child will develop:

• Friendship - The stage where the predator is building comfort with your child. Their goal here is to get out of the 'Stranger' zone and be an acquaintance. Aside from pulling the plug to their computer and turning your home into a prison, there isn't much you can do about this. The main thing for your child to look out for is age. If the person your child is talking to is in their teens or older, they should be cautious.
  
• Risk Assessment - This is the point where the red flags should start emerging. They might ask where the computer is in the house. If it's in their room, they don't have to worry about someone looking over their shoulder. Or they may ask how often they're alone. They'll try to determine if your child has any resentment toward you, which is an extremely exploitable vulnerability because your child is less likely to openly discuss what they're doing online. Your child may even engage in risky behavior just out of spite!
• Exclusivity - Once the predator feels safe, they will try to isolate themselves from the rest of the crowd by paying compliments or offering gifts. They will also make themselves seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is when they are gaining your child's trust and admiration.
• Sexualization - A predator may sexualize conversations at this point. The aim here is to pique your child's interest in sex. They will make sexual topics seem normal and commonplace. They might send sexual pictures in an attempt to arouse your child. If the predator is particularly vicious, this phase may not even occur because of what they have planned for their first meet.
• Meeting - The whole process until this point may take anywhere from a single conversation to several months of talking back and forth. Setting up a meeting will most likely consist of them ensuring your child will be alone, and they will likely stress that you be kept out of the loop - for any made-up reason. They might want to meet in a public place the first time in order to seal your child's trust. From this point forward, however, things will rapidly move toward abuse.

Without risk assessment and sexualization, you're left with a progression of events that could very well reflect that of a normal romantic relationship between similarly aged people (speaking in terms of your child being a teen). If you take out exclusivity too, all you have is a plain old friendship being formed.

In times past, it has been preached and taught and pounded into parents' heads that under no circumstances should you ever allow your child to meet someone online. I agree wholeheartedly if your child is young, but you may not have as much luck enforcing this with teenagers. With technology progressing as it has, that's becoming less and less of an option. The main reason is the Internet exposes you to millions of users, in contrast to the dozen or so friends your child might make traditionally in their lifetime. With this many options, finding friends has been made easier. Your child will want to meet people they met online. However, as a parent, it is entirely your decision.

Permitting your child to develop relationships online and take them offline may seem scary as hell, but if you conditionally permit this, your child will be far less likely to keep you totally in the dark. Meet the person and determine their intentions yourself. If they throw up any red flags, drill deeper, and let your child know why you think the person's intentions are not in their best interest. These visits should remain supervised at all times. If your child is a teenager, dates should be chaperoned just like any other date.

Online predators will seldom agree to meet a parent. Tell your children that you'd be happy to let them meet someone after you've met them yourself. "I'm not good with parents," is a cop-out, and your child must insist on it. Further avoidance is a clear-cut indicator that they don't want anyone to know who they are or what they intend to do.

Back to the Basics

Teaching your kids Internet safety comes down to one, very fine point that many children and teens know, but rarely think about: Everything posted online, whether it be a blog, email, MySpace, or an Internet forum, everything is public. However, there are steps that can be taken to protect your children. This is what the military calls a hardening a target - it's like putting on layers of armor. While no measure of protection is 100% infallible, the idea is to make your child so tough to get to, an aggressor will move on, and hopefully give up entirely and take up sewing.

The most powerful piece of protection you can give your child is knowledge. While teaching your kids internet safety might seem daunting, like any lesson, all it needs is a 'cool' twist to grab their interest. Given that most kids these days are technologically driven, society has done the heavy lifting for you! Your job is to put an interesting spin on things like privacy and security.

This is where you're in luck! I grew up just as schools began using computers in class, and have seen first hand what garners interest and what doesn't. As the son of a then-totalitarian parent, I know exactly what it takes to get through to even the most rebellious.

The first lesson in teaching kids Internet safety directed at you, the parent, and it's a simple one. Don't spy on your kids unless you feel like they are putting themselves in dangerous situations. Yes, you heard me right. I said don't spy on them. To elaborate, are you so good at searching your kids room that you feel like you could get a job at CSI? Yeah, that's spying. Purchasing expensive software to break into their MySpace or FaceBook? Spying. Casually viewing what they publicly post online? Nope, that's just being a casual website viewer following a breadcrumb trail.

This can also be one of many very scary tactics used by people with bad intentions to get information about your child. To illustrate the principal behind this, I'll tell you a very true story about a friend from back in high school.

My friend and I once got into a debate about this very subject. She argued that because only she knew her passwords, and the websites she used were, in her words, secure, that her information was safe. Long story short - a bet was made. If I could prove to her that I could find secrets she thought were safe, she'd give me a ride to school every day for the rest of the year. If I lost, I'd have to wash her car every week for the rest of the year.

Listen closely now, because this still very much applies to YOUR kids Internet safety. The websites have changed dramatically, but the concept remains the same, and the tactic is still widely employed.

All I had to go on was her email address. Using several search engines, I used that address to find sites where she publicly posted it. I then chopped off the @ and everything coming after (people tend to use the same username on different sites) and searched again. To her credit, there wasn't much, but I did get a few hits.

The first site was Yahoo Profiles. Being an obviously public 'about me' page, there wasn't anything there I didn't already know. There was, however, a link to an Internet forum that came up in the previous searches. Following that, I searched for all of her posts and found one where she mentioned having a LiveJournal. Going there, I again found little I didn't already know, but I noticed that she went by a different name. Searching with her new alias, I discovered someone by the same username had a profile on a support group website for people battling cancer.

I learned that at 15 years old, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. There were some very disheartening pictures of her in the hospital where she looked anything but well. I read her story - about how she had to deal with kids in school picking on her when her hair fell out, about coming to terms with death, and finally about how her cancer had been beaten back into remission and how she was enjoying her new life. She joined the site after the fact, and remained there as a supporter for people going the same tough battle she did.

After a heartfelt discussion, she asked me how I found out about it. I showed her exactly what I did, and some basic steps to keep her online personae segregated. Afterward, I'll say that I really did miss the friends I had on the school bus, but I so enjoyed sleeping in an extra hour every day!

While this information was benign, teaching your kids Internet safety is imperative because instead of a support group, it could have been a site where more personally identifiable information is posted. Personally, I'm tech savvy, and while I might personally find a task like that easy, I understand that many people don't have that luxury. Thankfully, software companies have risen to meet this growing demand.

One such company is SafetyWeb. They will do ALL of the searching for you. They will even tell you what sites your child is using right now, without paying a dime or even signing up. All you have to do is provide the email address! At $10 a month, it's worth it. Being a parent is tough, and expensive. I would know, my mom raised two boys by herself. So use the KIDSAFE coupon code to get 40% off (see below).