MySpace Cares About Safety
If your kids are on MySpace there is some good news. Today MySpace announced they are participating in a task force designed to increase safety on social networking sites. The task force created a “Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety” document with guidelines such as reviewing all images, videos and content, making profiles private for all 14- and 15-year-olds and deleting profiles of registered sex offenders.
Even better, MySpace is going to take safety one step further and add some additional features to their site, including:
- Setting 16- and 17-year-olds profiles to private, as well as 14- and 15-year-olds.
- Offering tips and PSAs on safety to parents.
- Developing free software to enhance safety.
- Possibly creating an email registry where parents can submit their child’s email address to prevent their kids from creating a MySpace profile.
- Improving communication with those who have complaints.
- Creating a 24 hour hotline for law enforcement, as well as helping law enforcement by releasing information about predators.
- Establishing a task force that will look in to technology to keep kids safe such as age verification.
Of course, it’s still our job as parents to monitor what are kids are doing online, but at least now we have some help from MySpace to keep our kids safe.
Maybe they should think about creating a Myspace4kids website or something. There are plenty of kids who have accounts and simply lie about their age – mine included, I must admit. She’s 11, but I don’t see the harm in her having a Myspace profile to keep in touch with family and close friends as long as it’s kept private and I monitor it. Still, if there was one meant for kids, maybe they’d use that and be a bit safer. Although, it’s not like there aren’t a million kid friendly sites out there anyway.
My 10 y/o niece is on MySpace and she probably has 100 friends all the same age on MySpace. They have a lot of room for improvement.