MySpace.com Warning
By D.A. Investigator Mike Harris
In recent months we have seen a concerning rise in interest in the site Myspace.com. This site was created in the fall of 2003 and has approximately 27 million members, mostly young adults and teens.
Myspace.com is a one-stop site on the web. It incorporates elements from other sites popular with our teenage community, such as instant messaging (IM), classifieds, invitation service similar to evite.com, and dating profiles similar to match.com.
Myspace members can decorate their home pages with art and photographs, some of which can be intimate or sexually explicit. Members have blogs* filled with commentary on their lives, along with links to the home pages of their friends.
Many Myspace.com members list personal information such as dates of birth, high school attended, parent information and activities they are involved in. The information posted in Myspace.com is accessible by anyone. Providing so much personal information increases your vulnerability to the dangers of the Internet. Some of these dangers include sex offenders and identity theft.
Many parents are not aware of what their teenager may be posting on Myspace.com or similar sites on the Internet.
Members in Myspace.com would never walk up to a stranger on the street and offer up the personal information they make available on the website and other areas on the Internet. Yet, Myspace.com is made up of million of strangers who have access to this information.
Parents should talk with their teens about what information should or should not be placed on these sites, and why.
We strongly recommend that parents should become more involved with what their teenagers are doing on-line.
You can limit exposure to your personal friends on Myspace.com by simply going to "account settings", and then to "privacy settings". You can then select who can have access. By doing this you limit unknown members (strangers) from having access to your personal information.
The Internet can be fun and educational, but it also has a dangerous side too. We encourage parents to be involved with their teenagers and the Internet.
*A blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect what is going on daily with the author.
Additional Resources
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
www.IncredibleInternet.com
Online Safety Project
netsmartz-an educational site for parents and kids
Last Modified: Mar 28, 2009 10:19 PM
