Slashdot Mirror
Parents To Block Kids From Joining MySpace
Reservoir Hill writes "A New York Times blog notes that attorneys general of 49 states are announcing a partnership with MySpace to fight sexual predators on social networks by letting parents submit the e-mail addresses of their children, so the company can prevent anyone from using that address to set up a profile. MySpace will also set up a 'closed' section for users under age 18 so only their established online friends can visit their pages. MySpace also promises to hire a contractor to identify and delete pornographic images on the site. 'This set of principles is a landmark and milestone because it involves an acknowledgment of the importance of age and identity authentication,' said Connecticut attorney General Richard Blumenthal." Blumenthal also actually said "If we can put a man on the moon..."
With a half-zillion free email providers out there, blocking a kid's email address will last all of two minutes. All they have to do is create an alias at Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
It reminds me of the early days of Hotmail, when they "verified" that you were a US resident by having you enter a matching city and ZIP code. Which just meant that all their overseas users lived in Beverly Hills, 90210.
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......
Someone needs a dose of reality.
I've seen on Slashdot all month. Parents can submit email addresses all day long, and their kids will create disposable addresses all day long.
Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'll start by submitting the e-mail addresses of everyone I dislike and claim to be their parents and say that they are lieing about their age. Another well thought out government idea.
And exactly how many rapes and molestations occur because of MySpace? How about we place the same restrictions on schools and churches, where you are certainly more likely to end up being molested.
Also, since when did we place the responsibility on the WEBSITE to prevent an IP address from reaching it? And what about DHCP? What about the next person that gets your IP in a few months? Why can't you filter out access on your own rather than placing the burden of your absurd paranoia on websites that have nothing to do with your ridiculous "my baby gonna get raped" fantasies?
And no, I didn't RTFA. Look at my UID. I'm old school and that's how I roll.
What do you bet there may be a long list of people wanting that job?
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
I'd like to see the parents asking their twelve year old girl what her email address is so they can lock down her myspace account and see where they went wrong when their child responds with "sweetltlhottie69@hotmail".
I'm wondering just which state is not taking part in this scheme? And could kids just claim to be from there to avoid the list.
Considering Phlebas, whoever the hell he is.
This list sounds like a perfect high-value target for every malware distributor and sicko in the net. I'd bet that most kids are worse than their parents at opening emails and clicking yes to "interesting" installs. "OOOHH! A free Pony Screen Saver!" Pwned by ponies....
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'd like to see the parents asking their twelve year old girl what her email address is so they can lock down her myspace account and see where they went wrong when their child responds with "sweetltlhottie69@hotmail".
With an e-mail address like that they're going to be even more surprised to find out that their 12-year-old daughter is actually a lonely 40-year-old man.
"Your honor, I trusted myspace to verify the age of the people I met online. I know she only looks 13 your honor, but her profile said she was 19!"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Most of the people that I know who are old enough to have kids on MySpace know a LOT less about using the Internet than their kids do. (Yeah, I know; there will be a few
Any "security" measures designed to "protect" kids don't have a chance of working unless either:
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
So, in security, we have this notion called an "attack tree". Let's suppose you want to stop someone from stealing your family jewels. You put the in a safe, and all is well, right? Well... maybe not. We create this tree, where the root is "steal the jewels", and the children under the root are various ways you might accomplish this ("Use a key to open the safe", "Drill out the hinges on the safe", "Create hole in safe"). And each of these nodes can be divided out further into more children, so to use a key for example, you either need to steal a key, or be one of the people who has a legitimate use for the key, or be the locksmith who installed the lock.
Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.
For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.
Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".
Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.
This is just another attempt by some politicians to claim that they are fighting to protect our children. Later on, when nobody actually remembers any of this, these politicians can tell a cheering crowd, "I worked hard to give parents the ability to limit their child's MySpace access, and help shield their children from sexual predators online." Of course it is idiotic, and children will find a way around it in less than a minute, but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program, not another pathetic attempt at technical measures to block their access.
Palm trees and 8
Oh well, we haven't encouraged parents to actually speak to their kids about this stuff for a long time, opting to shield children from anything deemed harmful by anyone.
Palm trees and 8
Today, the Attorneys General of 49 states took another step towards running for governor by knocking down yet another straw-man.
There, fixed that story for you. No need to thank me.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
I had the home network running through a transparent proxy which blocked certain websites. MySpace was on the block list (because the kid broke the rules about posting personal information, such as phone numbers).
She could still get to MySpace if she went to a friend's house, but the inconvenience of doing that made it "not a fun thing."
The blocking by email system is nothing but a feel-good bandaid that does nothing.
-- Will program for bandwidth
So Myspace built itself up to be a massive site for people looking at pictures of young and/or underage girls. It started with the 20-something crowd, but the teenagers made it explode. Now Myspace is a huge site, and cuts a deal with the AG to stop things. Now, if an upstart site starts bringing in Myspace's target customers, who wants to bet that Myspace can sic those same AG's on the upstart competition.
The teenage market is REALLY important to getting a new social technology adopted, and Myspace basically agreed to reduce their service a bit, in return for defacto preventing any competition from targeting them at all.
I think the larger issue that American society is presented with is not the ways parents must adapt to new technologies to keep up with their kids and teens, but rather, all the ways in which despite the promise of "convenience" of these technologies, middle-class American families have less time to foster the kind of physically present, interpersonal relationships with their children that are necessary for proper social development. We are inundated by the tidal wave of information and content, overstimulated by the omnipresent reach of media--whether it is in the form of television, print, internet, wireless, radio, or film, there can be no doubt that these technologies have enriched our lives in profound ways. However, parents across the country are conducting on a heretofore unprecedented and massive scale a social experiment with their children, raising them from the cradle to adulthood amidst this sea of instant communication, because they are either unwilling or unable to actually spend the time to be, well, parents. To be fair, the kids don't make it any easier--they see what their friends are doing, and for them, hanging out online is the equivalent (or better) to hanging out in person. They will naturally gravitate to those methods that are least understood by their parents.
In short, over the last 20 years, the interaction between parent and child has significantly degraded in both the quality of communication as well as its duration. As technologies to facilitate virtual socialization advance, their effect on the nuclear family structure will have long-lasting social and cultural effects.
Again, this is not to say that technology is bad, or that the only "true" way to raise a family is to completely sever one's connection to the wired (and wireless) world. It is, however, a wake up call. Is it really necessary to put television screens and DVD players in those minivans and SUVs? Do children really need to be babysat like this in a car? What ever happened to learning how to sit patiently? What ever happened to learning to develop one's imagination? I grew up without these toys; my parents drove me around all the time and I didn't need to be entertained. When it comes to MySpace or the internet in general, the genie's already out of the bottle. These measures are laughable, because it's not merely too little too late--talking about how easily circumvented such measures are is actually irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is, we wouldn't be in this mess if parents actually parented, and kids weren't so addicted to media. Playing email games and spying on one's children is not parenting. Taking the time to learn and understand them is far more effective. But that's easier said than done--corporate America has had us passive consumers in the palm of their hands for quite some time now. They are the ones bringing up today's children, grooming them to be the indentured servants of tomorrow's economy. And to prove my point, I think it's particularly telling that when the "threat level" is raised to "orange" or some other stupid color of the week, signifying that we should all be scared into signing our rights away, the government has the gall to tell us in the very same breath to "continue shopping and act like everything is normal."
This MySpace situation is not about trust or technology. It's really only one small facet of the greater reality that we are living in a society so fueled by rampant consumerism and debt that parents have lost the ability to raise well-adjusted children.
So rather then deal with many times a day actual sexual abuse of young people AGAINST THEIR WILL by adults, they're choosing to put all attention, and diverting everyone else's attention, to a problem that is at least 50% the fault of the young person and happens maybe twice a month at the most.
Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.
Despite shows like "Catch a Predator", 13-15 year old girls who have casual sex with 40 year olds they've talked to for a few hours online don't show up in news articles or in victimization reports-I'm betting they're rare to the point of extinction. More importantly, I SERIOUSLY doubt that 13-15 year olds are inviting strangers they've never talked to over the phone or seen via web cam to their homes for sex. Even the dumbest teen girls seem to have some ability to read body language and facial expressions via video and/or hear tone, inflection over audio. I don't think they're inviting total strangers to their house.
BUT, this is what we've been led to believe. We've been told there's a problem based solely on the existence of demand. We know there's no shortage of adult men willing to engage in casual sex with 13 year old girls, but we haven't been shown that there's even 1 girl willing to reciprocate for every 1000 guys.
Everybody goes nuts over this manufactured problem and take attention away from real victimization-that is young people being sexually abused against their will and without their consent. Real abuse is ignored in favor of virtually non-existent abuse.
Even worse is the fact that any teen girls meeting men online for sex is going of her own free will, whether her consent is informed or not is another issue. It seem that she would bear at least 40% of the blame for anything that happens.
The persons most likely to sexually abuse young people are the same people being constantly implored to monitor their teens every move-parents, step parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, teachers, priests, coaches, neighbors. Strange guy on the internet is somewhere above that guy that works the 7-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 5pm.
However, in my house we practice this apparently rare thing called, 'mutual respect' whereby he doesn't do such things, and I don't invade his privacy.
Actually, in your house, you practice this thing called willful ignorance, where by not checking you let yourself believe he's not doing anything.
I used to be a kid, so I know the only way you can know what your kid is up to is to trust, but validate.
paintball
Why do kids not have a right to privacy?
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
Tell you what -- before I had a computer entirely my own, I was certainly allowed to have a pencil and paper. And I was allowed to keep it in a secret place, if I wanted to. And my parents did not read my various diaries (though there weren't many attempts).
When I went out, I could go pretty much anywhere, I just had to tell them where I was going, and not stay out too late (most of the time). When I got a cell phone, they didn't screen my calls, they didn't have access to my call logs.
My parents apparently did a good job teaching me mutual respect. And the process has nothing to do with the Internet. I suspect this sudden Puritanical paranoia has much more to do with the tendency of people to suspend all reason when it comes to computers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!