MySpacePolice?
Posted by mike on January 25th, 2007
I read an interesting article today about “Building a safer MySpace“. Apparently MySpace is being sued by the family of a 14-year-old Texas girl who said she was assaulted by a predator she met on MySpace.
This is not new. Not to defend them, but MySpace has been taking measures for well over a year to prevent such things from happening. It seems you can’t turn on the news these days without it coming up in some story or another. They have already blocked kids under 14 from using it, and deleted existing profiles of those who fell under that age. They have put other profile-related security in place. They are now blocking those under 18 from crossing profiles with those over 18, which when you think about it essentially creates two MySpace sites (MyKidSpace, anyone?).
But perhaps the most asinine thing from this article was a quote from Adam Loewy, an attorney handling five lawsuits filed against MySpace.
If you own a [skating] rink that allows both adults and kids, the skating rink is held liable for any inappropriate interaction between the kid and the adult,” Loewy says. “MySpace knew these things were occurring, they just chose not to do anything about it. The difference is that the actual crime occurred off the Internet, but we believe that liability extends to the Internet.”
I think that’s a bit of a ridiculous assumption. We’re all weary of and tuned into the corporate evildoers. But Loewy is basically saying that MySpace was aware of child predators, and chose to ignore it. I find that almost hard to believe.
Instead, I believe MySpace was faced with a challenge. How do you implement Web 2.0 and a social networking website, and prevent certain people from socializing with certain other people? It’s very hard, and nearly impossible. If MySpace put as big of an effort into their site and member page layouts as they have this, it might actually be worth using. As it stands, I can barely tolerate most of the pages I see there. Many are loud, obnoxious, slow loading, and look like Geocities pages from 1996.
All this aside, MySpace is NOTHING like a skating rink. Why? Because at a skating rink, it’s pretty easy to seperate the adults from the children. Not very often do you see a kid on the floor during adult skate who is pretending to be a kid, or vice versa. If an adult pretends to be a kid, he would stand out pretty clearly. That’s much more difficult online, where all you have to go by is the data that person signed up with. Until someone figures out how to authenticate one from the other, division of ages will be little more than an exhaustive effort.
Finally, there’s this… I find it interesting that the first thing everyone (news, attorneys, parents, etc.) wants to do is point their finger at MySpace, who is providing a free service. Where are those parents when their kids are online? It would be interesting to know, of the files lawsuits, how many of the kids were allowed to use laptops or private computers while they are locked in their rooms. And it would be just as interesting to see how many of those parents have blocking software installed, or audit those computers to ensure their kids are not socializing with shady characters on sites like MySpace.
January 26th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I couldn’t agree more. The parents should be watching their kids or at least have an idea of what they are doing. Are they going to sue a porn site because their kid checked out a few nipples? It’s become too common practice for sue happy America to try and get money out of those who are trying to innovate. While I too can’t stand most of ‘MySpace’ because of the 1996 ‘angelfire-esc’ pages I think it has potential. Yes, I do actually have a myspace account and I just recently added a few friends to it simply to keep up with their lives.
January 26th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I have a MySpace account, too, but it’s virtually blank. I’m not really into who’s in my “top 10″ or whatever. I mainly signed up so I could view a movie website or something. That’s the main reason I stopped using the Windows Live account, because I didn’t like having my readers/visitors having to “belong” to the site in order to comment or use certain features.
But that aside, you are right. People are too quick these days to blame all their short comings on others. Some folks don’t want to admit they failed, so they sue someone else. It’s kind of sad…
January 27th, 2007 at 12:52 am
All in all, MySpace is a social network like all the others out there on the internet. In fact, as a college student, I strongly believe that MySpace is a great deal safer than facebook (a popular college network) these days. I was strongly against MySpace for the longest time. However, a couple of my very good friends used it and I created an account to keep up with them while I was away at school.
MySpace can only be as harmful as one makes it. If you keep your profile clean and avoid others profiles who you are not sure of, your MySpace experience can be safe and enjoyable!