Overexposed on the social Web

Photos of and lewd comments about high school track star Allison Stokke, 18, are “plastered across the Internet,” the Washington Post reports, and this week newspapers and blogs nationwide have covered this social-Web phenomenon (a Google News search Wednesday turned up about two dozen newspaper stories). This is all unwanted attention for Allison. “After dinner one evening in mid-May, Stokke asked her parents to gather around the computer,” according to the Post. “She gave them the Internet tour that she believed now defined her: to the unofficial Allison Stokke fan page [AllisonStokke.com - since taken down at her request], complete with a rolling slideshow of 12 pictures; to the fan group on MySpace, with about 1,000 members; to the message boards and chat forums where hundreds of anonymous users looked at Stokke's picture and posted sexual fantasies”; to the imposter profile on Facebook (which it immediately deleted on notification).” All the attention has been tough on her and her family. First Allison tried to ignore it, then she told her coach she wanted to figure out how to get it all under control. Within a few weeks, after a Yahoo search of her named turned up 310,000 results, she decided control was not a possibility. The takeaway: It helps to be a nationally ranked pole vaulter (attention all star athletes and persons of accomplishment of any sort), but notoriety good and bad can happen to just about anyone now on the user-driven Web. The solution? To be proactive. We can’t control what others post, but we can post positive content about ourselves. “The secret to burying unflattering Web details about yourself is to create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you," the New York Times reported two years ago. Sounds like a lot of work, but it could be fun and it’s better than what a future athletic recruiter or employer would otherwise find! See also “Kids: Budding online spin doctors" and “Your kids: What people see online."

Facebook's big plans

As Windows came to be the platform for all PCs, Facebook aims to be social networking’s platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. What he meant was, allow other businesses like widget makers and marketers to come in and add to users’ experience fun little functionalities Facebook can’t create all by itself, Fortune magazine reports. Social functionalities, of course. Fortune gave examples: “Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked….” The outcome, the New York Times reports, “is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook’s 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events.” Here, for balance, is Forbes on how widgets work on MySpace, and a widget maker’s POV from Red Herring. Then, for background, here’s a 40-something BBC tech correspondent’s (fun to read) first-hand experience with Facebook and a general social-networking primer from Independent in Dublin. Meanwhile, social networking’s not abating, USATODAY reports, describing three fairly new versions of it.

Kids: Chief technology officers

Or maybe that should be families’ chief information officers. Because of their Net literacy, young people are increasingly becoming their families’ top product researchers and online shoppers, the Christian Science Monitor reports. “Three-quarters of students between the ages of 8 and 14 say they have completed an online transaction, according to a national survey released May 9 by Stars for Kidz.” The Monitor adds that nearly 25% of kids shop with their parents’ credit cards, 26% use gift cards, and 8% use their own credit card. “Almost half say they help with electronic transactions because their parents are ‘clueless’ online” and a third help because parents don’t have time to shop.” But parents turn to their kids for a lot of other tech skills – from learning about sites like Wikipedia and YouTube to editing and printing digital photos to finding directions for parent drivers. The Monitor quotes experts as saying this development is great for children’s developing self-esteem and independence, and I think it fosters healthy and necessary parent-child dialogue about constructive use of the Net.

No screentime for a week

This mom and news correspondent says it right up front: Working in her favor in banning TV and computer use at her house for a week was the fact that her two sons, 8 and 10, are pretty outdoorsy and they aren’t yet teenagers (aka social networkers). On Day 2, she writes in the UK’s The Times, it’s like having toddlers again (no time to one’s self, etc.). Day 4 is the high point – when all the rewards are glimpsed. Day 6 sees a relapse (you may be surprised whose). At the end of the article, which you can probably tell was fun to read, you’ll find “A mother’s [slightly tongue-in-cheek] tips to cut screen addiction.”

AGs' 'p.r. campaign'

That’s what Mark Rasch, former head of the Department of Justice’s computer crimes unit called it. In his column “Your space, MySpace, everybody’s space” that appeared in The Register and SecurityFocus.com, Rasch writes, “This is not the first time that law enforcement agents have used public perception of a crisis to try to convince private entities to waive privacy policies and pony up information to the government without legal process.” He adds: “MySpace didn't ‘completely refuse to cooperate,’ it just asked the AGs to comply with the law - or more accurately not force MySpace to break the law.” The law he’s referring to is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which limits ISPs and online communications providers’ ability to disclose member information. The attorneys general, Rasch writes, “found the privacy laws as applied inconvenient, so they attacked the service provider. Indeed, they insinuated that not only was MySpace [i]permitted[/i] to turn over subscriber or other data to the cops, but that it was legally obligated to do so, just because the cops wanted it. They never explained how the information would prevent a crime, or empower parents, or more importantly why drafting a subpoena was an excessive burden. Indeed, it apparently wasn't, as the AGs eventually got them.” Harsh, but thoroughly reported, and I’m linking to it because I feel accurate information – not fear campaigns – is what really empowers parents.

MySpace users mis-labeled sex offender

It was bound to happen simply because technology is imperfect: the first mislabeled “sex offender” blocked by MySpace. This story in ABC News illustrates how hard it is to verify adults’ identities, much less minors, and how the best of intentions can have unintended negative consequences. Jessica Davis in Colorado was mistakenly identified as registered sex offender Jessica Davis in Utah by MySpace’s Sentinel Tech sex-offender detection technology. So MySpace sent her the Colorado resident “an email that began, ‘It has come to MySpace's attention that you are a registered sex offender in one or more jurisdictions.’ The note ended with an email address saying Davis had 14 days to appeal.” She did. Sentinel Tech apologized.

Non-private pasts

In a commentary in The Observer, a media company chief creative officer talks about how young users of “the confessional media” will never be able to “take it back” the way today’s politicians, celebrities, and other grownups can. “The bulk of them use their MySpace and Facebook entries for self-advertisement, social networking and the generally raw process of growing up and working out their identities. With the aid of these sites, they are the first generation … whose sexual adventures, drug taking, immature opinions and personal photographs are indelibly recorded electronically.” He asks if there’s been a fundamental shift in attitudes toward privacy (for a US response, see New York magazine, which says “the future belongs to the uninhibited”). The “key elements,” he says of protecting privacy online now as much as offline of yore are to “increase media literacy, enable the withdrawal of consent [e.g., to have photos displayed] and ensure that obsolete data can be effectively deleted.” I agree that we all need to be thinking and talking with our kids about doing our own spin control – how we’re presenting ourselves online and what the implications are – but the part about withdrawing consent (proving that the photos in question, for example, are of oneself so they can be deleted) could prove very unwieldy. Stay tuned - this will all get increasingly interesting.

New phishing trick

Yet another indicator that we can never rely on technology alone to protect computers or kids. In this case, it’s a sneaky phishing scam to grab Net users’ social security and credit card numbers, among other sensitive info. The Register says it’s “able to spoof eBay, PayPal and other top Web destinations without triggering antiphishing filters in IE 7 or Norton 360.” It got this from a Londoner who “says he's been careful to practice good PC hygiene. He runs Norton 360 and uses the latest IE version, which Microsoft has taken pains to lock down with a variety of safety features, including one that alerts users when they visit many spoofed sites. He's also careful to examine the certificates that accompany financial sites he visits before logging in to them.” So this one surprised him. The Register heard from a security expert who “guesses those experiencing this attack have inadvertently installed an html injector. That means the victims' browsers are, in fact, visiting the PayPal website or other intended URL, but that a dll file that attaches itself to IE is managing to read and modify the html while in transit.” It helps to be a good speller and grammarian, because typos and bad grammar are frequent giveaways in phishers’ emails that otherwise look like Paypal or your bank.

Social-networking training wheels

Remember Beanie Babies? Cabbage Patch Dolls? Well, now there’s Webkinz. The only (significant) difference is Webkinz have a social site/virtual world for their young owners – kind of a starter MySpace for people below its minimum age. “Last year, Webkinz brought in more than $45 million in retail in the U.S.,” CNET reports. The writer went through hoops to acquire her Webkinz, named Cneta, then more to register at the site, where – like all members - she started with 2,000 units of “KinzCash,” which goes fast because next she needs to decorate Cneta’s room in the site and accessorize her new virtual pet. She bought Cneta “a salmon strudel feast for Cneta, as well as a batch of her favorite food, marshmallows, rainbow-patterned boots, a blue striped bed set, a scooter and some horn-rimmed specs.” She quickly needed more KinzCash for all this self-expression, and she could earn it by playing games in the site, passing quizzes, and doing virtual jobs. Communications on the site is even more restricted than on ClubPenguin. “The only way to communicate with a Webkinz owner, it turns out, is if you already know someone with an account,” which would probably be good news to many parents of Webkinz owners. But not all parents are thrilled with the product/service – see the article for more (including photos). And here’s the big picture on kid social worlds from Business 2.0.

Barbie vs. the penguins

Even though she reigned supreme on Web 1.0, as more and more kid-oriented virtual worlds like ClubPenguin and WebKinz open on the Web, Barbie’s struggling to keep up, according to a CNET analysis. “Mattel's Barbie.com and EverythingGirl.com have the highest concentration of girls age 2 to 11 on the Web, according to researcher Nielsen NetRatings, but their overall audience hasn't grown much over the years.” It adds that Barbie.com got about 1.9 million unique visitors last month, down from 2.1 million in April 2006 (ClubPenguin attracted 4 million visitors, Webkinz 3.6 million, and Neopets 3.2 million last month). This summer Mattel’s coming out with an MP3 player “that can be accessorized like a doll and used to unlock special animations, make friends and shop in a virtual world on the Web.” Here’s an item on Sony’s rumored interest in acquiring ClubPenguin at tech news site GigaOm.com.

Cyworld's 'video studio'

The social networking service that started in South Korea and launched in the US last summer is kicking video-sharing up a notch. Social Computing Magazine reports that it has launched its “Video Studio and Plaza, a forum for members to upload, edit, mix and share videos or photos.” With this feature, social producers or video sharers can use effects like “slow motion, cross-fades, color enhancements, and special effects.”

Videogames, boys & 'muscularity'

The University of Illinois released an unusual study about youth and videogames. Researchers there “discovered exposure to video gaming magazines has a stronger influence on pre-adolescent boys' drive for muscularity, or desire for muscle mass, than does exposure to magazines depicting a more realistic muscular male-body ideal,” United Press International reports. It’s the extreme muscularity depicted in videogame mags’ that seems to have such appeal – interestingly, for Caucasian not African-American boys. Self-image doesn’t seem to come into play – the results were the same for all body types.

Spam: Fact of life?

That’s how Americans are beginning to view it, apparently. A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that US Net users are becoming more resigned to having spam in their in-boxes, and parents will be glad to know that porn spam is on the decrease. The Associated Press reports that “37% of US email users say they are getting more junk in their personal email account, about half say they have not noticed a change,” and more than a quarter (28%) say spam isn’t a problem at all, up from 16% four years ago. Spam containing pornography “appears to be dropping in relation to pitches for drugs and financial opportunities, as well as scams for sensitive data like passwords.” Here’s the Pew study.

Classified-ads abuse

This unnerving story could involve any classified-ads service on the social Web. A woman who apparently wanted to “get back at her aunt” for being unfair to her mother placed an ad in Craigslist.com “inviting the public to ‘come and take anything you want’ from the [aunt’s] house,” Scripps News reports. The public did, and the woman has been charged with “one count each of second-degree burglary, first-degree malicious mischief, and first-degree criminal impersonation in the incident.” Court documents say the person “had disliked the victim for years and was upset because the victim had evicted her mother from the house in question without letting her mother get her possessions.”

Social Web's complexity: Illustration

The story on WhosaRat.com, though not about youth, clearly illustrates how complicated the user-driven Web is. The site - whose mission is to out “rats” (informants or what judges call “cooperators”) by publishing court records – is a lot like a social-networking site. It “offers biographical information about people whom users identify as witnesses or undercover agents. Users can post court documents, comments and pictures,” the Associated Press reports. How hard it must be to tell who’s telling the truth about who, whether an “outing” is purely out of revenge - if the person behind a profile is really exposing a snitch or just bullying someone who did nothing wrong. The site says it’s “a resource for criminal defendants and does not condone violence.” For a very balanced examination of the site, don’t miss “Whosarat.com: Two views of outing witnesses” at NetworkWorld.com. It says – rightly, I think, regardless of who set it up and why – that “what … should be done about such sites ought to be a tough call for anyone interested in balancing the interests of law enforcement, witness protection and free speech.”

Kids' summer screentime & media use

Because of all that free time summer gives kids, the season calls for a little extra thought and family communication about the mental and physical health effects of more screentime. In fact, Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer recommends a “media diet” for summer vacationers, reports SafeKids.com’s Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com - because kids in general spend 45-50 hours a week consuming media, let alone when school’s out. When screentime starts eclipsing physical activity, of course, obesity becomes an issue. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that that since 1980 the proportion of overweight children ages 6 to 11 has more than doubled, and the rate for adolescents has tripled,” Larry reports. Steyer’s “diet” includes setting screentime and technology limits and sticking to them, whether young people’s favorite pastimes involve social networking, blogging, IMing, or videogames. Larry offers tips for constructive use of both the Internet and videogames. Here are Common Sense Media’s “Tips for a Healthy Media Diet."

Defaming site: 3 teens accused

The profile, which was online for four days in February, impersonated the father of a classmate of one of its alleged creators and “featured a confederate flag and racial slurs,” the Carlisle (Penn.) Sentinel reports. The town police chief Alan Houck said he wasn’t sure why the kids created the MySpace page but thought they might’ve decided to “smear the family name” because of a disagreement with the son. He said he “intends to file identity theft and harassment charges against the teens unless the juveniles come forward to talk to him. In that case, Houck said, he may consider filing lesser charges.”

P2P's risks: New study

After Jon Dudas, director of the US Patent & Trademark Office, read this study, he decided to send out an official USPTO report because so many file-sharers (or parents of file-sharers) who think they’re just downloading free music are actually jeopardizing the security of very personal info on their computers. He was also motivated to because, he says in the Foreward, he’s a dad who “manages a home computer.” Two key takeaways from this 80-page report (press release here): 1) research has found that 45% of popular downloaded files contained malicious software code, and 2) “At least four of the [five popular P2P file-sharing programs the study analyzed] have deployed partial-uninstall features: If users uninstall one of these programs from their computers, the process will leave behind a file that will cause any subsequent installation of any version of the same program to share all folders shared by the ‘uninstalled’ copy of the program. Whenever a computer is used by more than one person, this feature ensures that users cannot know which files and folders these programs will share by default.” In other words, parents of file-sharers need to look at the preferences or options of any P2P software on the family PCs to see what folders are designated for sharing the files in them. See this on the FTC’s thorough P2P study.

Texting's cost for teens

What a bummer – having to work over summer vacation not to make money but to pay off one’s text-messaging debt. That’s what 17-year-old Sofia in the Washington, D.C., area faces because of a $1,100 monthly cellphone bill for 6,807 text messages last month, and her parents’ plan included only 100 free text messages, the Washington Post reports. “Forget minutes. It's all about the text allowance. It needs to be supersized, now that instant messaging has leapt from the desktop to the mobile…. Think it, text it, keep it short, have to have it,” the Post adds. Now, anyway, since texting teens is nothing new in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, much less Europe and the rest of Asia. Last month Verizon Wireless "introduced an unlimited texting plan because even its highest bundle of free text messages - 5,000 a month - wasn't enough” for teens, according to the Post. It tells of a group of teens heading to Morocco with no phones, and of a mother wondering how they’ll deal with communicating the old-fashioned, face-to-face way.

MySpace gives sex-offender data

MySpace and the state attorneys general have worked out a solution. Apparently without notifying MySpace, eight AGs last week publicly called for the social site to turn over sex-offender information. MySpace countered saying that federal privacy law required a subpoena or some other legal instrument before such data could be turned over. Today MySpace announced the two parties had arrived at “a process to expedite the delivery of useful information to enable the attorneys general to use it in their pursuit of any of these individuals who are breaking the law." The Associated Press reports that MySpace general counsel Mike Angus “said the company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp., had always planned to share information on sex offenders it identified and has already removed about 7,000 profiles, out of a total of about 180 million.” Here's last week's coverage.

Videogame hooks kid on reading

Here’s something you don’t hear often: Playing videogames can help kids get into reading. It happened to 8th-grader Christopher. He told the Press-Enterprise (in southern Calif.) that there are action games and storyline games, and he found he really liked the latter (he was reading below grade level at the time). One of those, Tales of Symphonia, was recommended to him by a relative, and “quickly discovered if he was going to have any success - if he was going to win this game – ‘I had to read to keep up’,” the Press-Enterprise reports. “He's probably logged 200-plus hours playing - and winning. And he's gone retro. Now, he's reading books” – specifically Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series of eight books and Kathryn Lasky's “owl-populated fantasy series, Guardians of Ga'Hoole." A call to a teacher at Christopher’s school told writer Dan Bernstein that Christopher was not alone in this “Video-to-Book Phenomenon.”

Profile of a teen online victim

David Finkelhor, one of the US's top experts in online youth victimization, called her "Jenna" at the "briefing on Capitol Hill where he was presenting his research. In what he described as a fairly typical predation case….

Jenna was 13 and "from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chatrooms, had the screenname 'Evilgirl.' There she met a guy who, after a number of conversations admitted he was 45. He flattered her, sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And eventually he drove across several states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested, in her company, she was reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement authorities."

The picture Dr. Finkelhor - director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire - was painting as he related this actual case was very different from the impression most of us have somehow arrived at about sex crimes against kids on the Internet.

It concerns him, he said, that somehow the American public has gotten the idea that criminals are tricking kids into disclosing personal information by pretending to be peers and lying about their sexual motives, then stalking, abducting, and raping them. Parents deserve to know that that is not what’s going on.

Finkelhor's research shows that, "in a representative sample of law-enforcement cases, only 5% of these [online child victimization] cases actually involved violence. Only 3% involved an abduction." Almost no deception was involved. "Only 5% of the offenders concealed the fact that they were adults from their victims; 80% were quite explicit about their sexual intentions."

Here's his conclusion: "These are not violent sex crimes. They are criminal seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities…." Let me interrupt him just to say that here is where parents' and other caregivers' focus needs to be – teenage vulnerabilities. Finkelhor continues: "The offenders play on teens' desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding." Note that last word: “understanding.” This is a question that long predates the Internet: how to make sure teens with a lot of stresses and variables in their lives don’t turn to strangers, online or offline, for understanding, sympathy, or escape?

"Jenna" thought she was in love with the man she was with when he was arrested. Finkelhor says she didn’t want to cooperate with the police. And this was not the first time she'd met with him for a sexual encounter ("in 73% of these crimes the youth go to meet the offender on multiple occasions for multiple sexual encounters," Finkelhor told policymakers). And this is the typical scenario for teen online victimization.

Seeing these facts, a lot of parents can breathe a sigh of relief, I think. The vast majority of teenagers simply don't match Jenna's high-risk profile and behavior. But here's where psychologists, social workers, and educators who do work with young risk-takers and run-aways come in. This emerging reality is calling on them to fold the Internet into their screening and treatment programs.

And we all need to be addressing teens more (and parents less) with our "prevention messages," Finkelhor suggests. "So much of what we've been doing has been directed primarily at parents, but parents' credibility and authority have worn thin,” he said, “among the kids who we found to be most at risk for this kind of victimization. These are kids who have substantial conflict situations in their family." In the Q&A period following presentations, Dr. Finkelhor said he thought this group only represented "probably 5%" of online teens.”

There is a bottom line for parents, though, now that we understand the facts better. The message to our kids is really not the old "don't give out personal information" or "keep your social-networking profile private." The most basic message is: "Don't talk about sex online with strangers." If they're not doing that, they're going to be just fine online - as far as "predators" are concerned, anyway. Then there's the peer-to-peer problem, cyberbullying. But that's another story….

Related links

"Just the Facts About Online Youth Victimization" – the May 3 briefing presented at the Capitol by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee in Washington. You'll find links on this page to a video of the whole session as well as a transcript in pdf format.

"Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check" in the March 16 issue of NetFamilyNews

“Internet Safety Line: We Must Teach Our Children How To Make Intelligent Choices When Using The Web” in the Hartford Courant

Cough-med abuse sites

One in 10 teenagers (2 million+) have abused cough medicine, according to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. “Both in liquid and gel-cap forms, they're highly accessible and cheap and come with little social stigma attached. But, like other over-the-counter drugs, they can be dangerous when abused,” US News & World Report reports. It adds that “thousands of Web sites promote the abuse of cough medicine” and detail ways to use it. Abuse of its active ingredient, dextromethorphan, can cause “serious cognitive problems, including psychosis and paranoid delusions,” according to US News, which adds that some abusers are taking 25-50 times recommended dosage. Parents should also know that there are no treatment programs or FDA-approved treatment specific to cough-medicine abuse.

Celebrity prince on social Web

Britain’s Prince William’s Facebook profile will spark some interesting questions about privacy on the social Web! For one thing, a whole lot of people are going to be wondering what network he’s on (St. Andrews University’s probably) so they can see his profile and be his “friend.” So far he has 44 friends on his list, “including Alexandra Aitken, daughter of disgraced Tory politician Jonathan Aitken, along with many of his fellow students from Scotland's St. Andrew's University,” AllHeadlinesNews.com reports. It adds that “one of William's pals, Edward Blunt, has posted a photo of the prince playing polo, next to which the young royal has written ‘Think that's more like it, although I didn't pot it.’ His friend replies: ‘You will never beat me till you work on your technique.’ Clarence House refused to comment on what they said was a ‘private matter’." I wonder if Clarence House is having as much of a challenge with changing definitions of "public" and "private" as parents are.

Piracy genie won't return to bottle

Heard of 1Dawg.com? It’s a video-sharing site that claims to be growing 40 times faster than YouTube, Forbes reports. Then there’s DailyEpisodes.com. Its users “vote for their favorite portal, so that when lawyers manage to shut down one copyright-breaking link site, viewers can quickly flock to the next best,” according to Forbes. But far more than these or US-based YouTube as a media-companies’ headache is Sweden-based ThePirateBay.org, which is basically the global nexus for copyright infringement. This “world's largest repository of BitTorrent files … helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files” for free, with the help of Sweden’s easygoing copyright laws. The Pirate Bay has also “distributed its servers to undisclosed locations and is even soliciting donations to purchase a small island where it can avoid copyright laws altogether,” Forbes says. It’s a fascinating, well-reported article that illustrates very effectively how tough it is for laws, governments, companies, or parents to control what users do on the Internet. Meanwhile, CNET writer Declan McCullagh reports that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is “proposing a new crime: ‘Attempted Copyright Infringement’." Here’s a San Jose Mercury News blog’s tongue-in-cheek version of the story.

Rein in food marketers?

Fast-food companies trying to be “friends” on social-networking sites; placing funny, grainy, homemade-looking clips on video sites for people to share around; developing advergames for kids’ sites – these are what a new 98-page report on food marketing in digital media is about. The report, by the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy, will be presented to “the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday [today], the eve of an FTC deadline for public comment on food marketers' tactics to reach children across all media,” CNET reports. It adds that the Center “instigated the enactment of the federal Child Online Protection Act [COPA] with its digital marketing study in the mid-'90s.” Meanwhile, CBS News took a thorough look at the very immersive advertising in sites like Neopets, Whyville (where Toyota’s promoting virtual cars in this online world for tweens) – see “Advergaming: Online Games Chock-Full Of Products — From Skittles To SpongeBob.”

Technically speaking a sex offender

A news story about proposed legislation in Connecticut that would revise the state’s statutory rape law brings out the tragic, unintended consequences of labeling some people sex offenders. The Hartford Courant tells the story of a man who, at 18, was convicted of having sex with his then-15-year-old girlfriend, “who told investigators she was a willing partner.” Her mother knew of the relationship. It appears that the girl’s non-custodial father turned him in. The Courant explains that if the age gap between the two teens had been less than two years, “he wouldn't have been arrested under the state's second-degree sexual assault statute.” The Courant also reports that “attorneys and legislators have complained that the two-year age difference is too narrow and that teenagers experimenting with sex can be treated like sexual predators because of it. Others say a felony conviction stigmatizes teenagers who wouldn't otherwise have been arrested and makes it difficult for them to find work,” which is the case for this young man now 22. Legislation is now being considered in the state legislature that “would increase the allowable age gap between sexually active teens from two to four years.”

Can online kids be verified?

This question keeps coming up because politicians keep insisting it has to happen and ID verification professionals keep saying it’s not possible. And it’s not, actually, unless or until personal information on minors is as available as personal information on adults. By personal info, I mean credit records, mortgages, mother’s maiden name, social security number, etc., all pulled together in the kind of database credit bureaus have. There is no such database on minors for any ID or age-verification technology to check against. And does this society, particularly parents, want such a national database on children to exist, given all the database hacking and theft in the news in recent years and given the attractiveness of squeaky-clean minors’ credit records to ID thieves? In fact, there is a federal law that protects children’s personal info in the US. So, certainly, online adults’ ages and identities can be verified, but not children’s. Jacqui Cheng recently blogged about this in ArsTechnica.com, referring to a one-day conference that thoroughly vetted the options and aired many perspectives, hosted by the Washington-based Progress & Freedom Foundation; here’s the transcript. And speaking of children’s privacy and databases, check out “Half a million kids’ DNA on UK police database” in the UK’s The Register. It reports that the DNA data of 4.1 million people are now in the database, more than 520,000 of them people under 16. Britons can have their info removed (and presumably their children’s), but only 115 did last year. The comments at the bottom of the article offer a good look at the privacy implications.

MySpace & the attorneys general

Eight state attorneys general Monday sent a letter to MySpace requesting that, by the end of the month, the social-networking site turn over data on registered sex offenders who use the site,” CNET reports. MySpace responded Tuesday that it was prepared to work with the attorneys general, but "its cooperation hinges on whether the state officials follow the law and subpoena the names, a step that a leader of the state attorneys general said was not necessary," the New York Times reports (MySpace was referring to a federal law basically barring disclosure of criminal records without a subpoena). The social-networking site also said it had "already taken down the profiles of thousands of sex offenders since the beginning of May when it began running its own database check." In an earlier statement, Nigam said MySpace “had launched software in early May to proactively identify and remove any known sex offenders from the site." The company's doing so using a national database of sex-offender data that it created with the help of ID-verification company Sentinel Tech. But even with that national list, finding all registered sex offenders is difficult without a law requiring them to register their email addresses and other online contact info. MySpace lobbied for such a law last year, and Sens. McCain and Schumer introduced legislation to this effect early this year (see my 12/8/06 item). The legislation’s still pending. Although eliminating all sex offenders on any social site would certainly help, not all pedophiles have been arrested and convicted. Too, MySpace is not the only social site where they could be active, and I wonder if the attorneys general plan to send similar letters to the many other social-networking sites that have teenage members.

Web access from phones

Given how much texting goes on in the UK and Europe, I was surprised to see this finding that the US isn’t far behind Britain in Web access by phone. Researchers Telephia and comScore say 19% of Britons (ages 15+) access the Web via mobile phone (5.7 million compared to the 30 million who use the Web on computers). That compares to 17% of Americans, with 30 million on the Web via cellphone compared to 176 million via computers. The fact that mobile access in both countries is nearing one-fifth of Web users indicates how mobile the Internet is getting, especially for its earliest adopters: youth.

Youth: Cellphones not landlines

More than a quarter of US 18-to-24-year-olds don’t even have landlines, and even more – 29% - of 25-to-29-year-olds are cellphone-only users, the Associated Press reports. That’s according to a just-released study by the Centers for Disease Control. “The percentages declined with age after that, with 2% of those 65 or over having only cellphones.” Youth shares this move away from landlines with one other demographic group: the poor. “Twenty-two percent of the poorest adults had only cellphones, double the rate for those who are not poor,” the CDC found. It told the AP that “the trend away from landline phones affects the telephone industry, 911 emergency service providers, and government and private polling organizations, which rely heavily on random calls to households with wired telephones.”

Facebook's new classifieds

The US’s 6th most high-traffic site introduces classified ads today. Facebook’s new ad section, called “Marketplace,” “will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all that could include things like solicitations for rides home for the holidays,” the New York Times reports. Users of the 22 million-member site will probably like the privacy and delivery options built in. They can show an ad to friends only on their profile or send them out in a “feed” (“the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site”). They can also choose to make their ads available to everyone on their network (their high school, college, company, or regional network that’s closed off to Facebook users in other networks). The emphasis is on privacy right now, with no anonymous classifieds, Facebook says, though the company might eventually charge for broader ad distribution. MySpace has had classifieds for nearly a year and Friendster has announced it will add them.

Consult 'Cyber-Safe Kids...'

There is no other tech-parenting manual you'll need besides Nancy Willard's Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. Please click to this week's issue of my newsletter to find out why.

How dissed superintendent handled it

It looks like students and a lot of adults in Saline, Michigan, have had some healthy debate this week about online vs. offline behavior and free speech. After high school students “used harsh language to ridicule Saline Area Schools Superintendent Beverley Geltner,” the Ann Arbor News reports, the superintendent met individually with the students and their parents, then held a meeting last night of about 100 students and parents to discuss the students’ postings. Nobody was suspended, Ms. Geltner said, but she held meetings “to address the ‘limited understanding’ that parents and young people have about the dangers of Internet postings,” the News reports in a separate article. At least one student learned that what he posted in Facebook wasn’t necessarily going to be seen only by the group. Geltner reportedly was both criticized and supported for the way she handled the incident, but if something was learned about behavior and repercussions on the social Web, and maybe a little about ethics and free speech, I think she handled it as well as possible. Note what a Philadelphia dean of students Mark Franek wrote in Educational Leadership: “Behaviors in cyberspace (yes, words are deeds) are downloadable, printable, and sometimes punishable by law. Students need to hear this message, starting in upper elementary school” (archived in Franek’s blog).

State laws on age verification

Though people on both sides of the social Web’s age-verification debate have great intentions, opponents really seem to know more about what’s actually possible than proponents do. Proponents say things like, “if we can put a man on the moon, we can verify someone’s age,” the New York Times reports in an article about states proposing legislation requiring verification. Opponents or skeptics view it as overkill, what I’d call a baby+bathwater result (one opposing state legislator told the Times such a law is more like a sledgehammer where a “small mallet” would work better). ID verification companies say it’s not possible without a national database of children’s personal information (civil liberties and consumer privacy organizations would have some things to say about that – not to mention many parents). Child-safety advocates say it could potentially provide a false sense of security for parents and greater risk – if kids simply go to another site parents don’t know of that is less responsible to public opinion and parents’ requests than MySpace or other popular sites laws would cover. What the article doesn’t get into is all that’s in the bathwater these proposed laws are trying to address but don’t even begin to touch (see “Predators vs. cyberbullies” as well as “Verifying online kids’ ages”).

'Tourists' could respect 'natives' more

A commentary in The Guardian this week was music to my ears. Bronwyn Kunhardt, co-founder of the UK nonprofit Social Media Consensus, cites Pews Internet & American Life research to begin to quantify all the good things young people are doing on the social Web, where they are the premier social producers and creative networkers, aka the “natives.” Pew found that “55% of online teens have created a profile on a social network site such as MySpace or Facebook, compared to 20% of online adults. Of particular interest in this medium of self-presentation are the connections these kids seek to establish and augment: 39% of online teens share their own creations online. In other words, friends, and potential friends share artwork, photos, stories, or videos. This compares to the 22% of online adults who do this. Of the young people questioned 26% say they remix found and discovered online content into something they can characterise as their own creative expression. Only 9% of online adults do this.” And yet it’s the adults, the tourists who don’t full understand this space and only hear of its downsides, who are setting policy. Not good. So here’s the music in my ears: Kunhardt writes that “our role as responsible ‘tourists’ is to respect the natives and do what we can to understand their lives and their ‘habitat.’ Warnings about risk will always fall on deaf ears if we can't also articulate and celebrate the benefits.” We need at least to get going on researching and articulating those benefits (I tried to do the latter in my recent “Lifeline” article.)

Child-porn trading alleged in Second Life

If anybody needed confirmation that the online virtual world Second Life is not for kids, they got it this week. Law enforcement in Halle, Germany, is looking for Second Life players “who are reportedly buying sex with other players posing as children, as well as offering child pornography for sale,” The Guardian reports. A German investigative reporter who’s a member of Second Life told The Guardian “he had been ‘shocked to see’ the virtual child pornography meetings to which he was invited for 500 Linden dollars - around £1.50 [$2.99]. He said the same group of people subsequently put him in touch with traders in real child pornography.” Second Life’s parent, Linden Lab, in San Francisco, is working with police to find the offending players. Virtual child pornography is not a crime in the US, but in Germany it’s a crime “punishable by up to five years in prison,” The Guardian adds. Here’s the BBC’s coverage. According to just-released comScore research, 16% of Second Life users are German, making Germany “the largest country of origin in the ‘game’" of some 16 million players (followed by the US), The Register reports.

Parents using game ratings

Contrary to what has been reported, parents are pretty smart about videogame ratings these days. They’re increasingly relying on them “to guide their decisions about what titles to allow their children to play,” TechNewsWorld reports. “In fact, 73% of parents said they make a point of checking the Entertainment Software Rating Board's rating every time they consider either a game rental or a purchase.” In other finds by a recent study the ESRB commissioned, 60% of parents with kids under 17 never allow their kids to play M-rated games; 91% take a game's rating into consideration when deciding to purchase a game, 52% call it “a very important” part of the purchase decision, and 17% call it “the most important” part.

Hacker post h.s. threats in MySpace

Someone claiming to be a Petaluma (Calif.) High School student “hacked into several students' MySpace accounts at about 10 p.m. Tuesday” and posted threats that he or she would bring a gun to school today and shoot people, NBC11.com reports. The person also made references to the Virginia Tech shootings. The school, which told police that several hundred students received the threatening message, notified parents with a recorded phone message last night, but about 35% of the students were in class today. “In addition to the Petaluma Police Department's school resource officer there were five to seven additional officers on campus,” according to the TV report, but police said they found nothing suspicious today, and classes are scheduled as usual for tomorrow and Friday. MySpace works closely with law enforcement, with a toll-free number for police requests, so the hacker’s identity could well have been worked out by the time I post this (Wed. evening).

Web 2.0 is teen space: Study

The term “Web 2.0” gets tossed around a lot, and I often use “social Web” or “user-driven Web” to give parents a little clearer picture of it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently decided to get a better fix on this new phase of the Web, as it’s so often called: who uses it and how they use it in the context of how they use the Internet and Net-connected devices in general. Pew’s just-released findings – in “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users” - only further confirmed what a lot of us suspected. The user-driven Web is the youth-driven Web. Only 19% of adult Internet users in the US say they’ve shared something online that they’ve created themselves (artwork, photos, stories, videos), which is what Web 2.0 is all about. “The typology clearly shows how modern information technology is the province of youth,” Pew found (p. 49). Meanwhile, market researcher Yankee Group just released its finding that "72% of US teens are actively logging onto social networking Web sites." Here’s CNET’s coverage of the Pew study.

PC patch-up time

Yesterday was "patch Tuesday," Microsoft's monthly security-patch day when all family-PC owners should be sure their computers have the latest security updates. This month, "at least 19 separate security holes in its Windows operating system and other software, including two vulnerabilities that criminals are actively exploiting to take control of Windows PCs," Washington Post computer-security writer Brian Krebs reports. Brian adds that Microsoft says all seven of the bundles these patches come in are "critical." Windows PC owners can find more info at Microsoft's security page.

Canada's reax to Web 2.0...

...are just as largely ignorant as US ones, it's a little comforting to know. The latest response in Canada, in this case to Facebook, was an announcement from the Ontario government last week "that it was banning access to the site for thousands of bureaucrats and elected officials," law professor Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star. "While the merits of Facebook are open to debate – some love it, others hate it, and many simply do not understand what the fuss is about – there should be no debating the fact that many of these policy responses are unnecessary, knee-jerk reactions to an emerging social phenomenon that is poorly understood." Since Facebook started allowing regional, not just college, university, and high school networks of users, it has grown from 8 million users last summer to about 21 million now, according to Professor Geist, with Toronto as the service's largest regional network in the world. Canada's recent "backlash," Geist says, seems to be centered around "derogatory" comments in Facebook profiles (often called "cyberbullying") and "workplace productivity." But mindless banning has its own negative impact, he suggests: "The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the Internet generation's equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler – the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip." I wish I was seeing this view in more news reports around the world.

Top-ranked social sites

It’s no surprise that MySpace and Facebook were the first- and second-ranked social-networking sites on Compete.com’s list for March ’07 – in terms of both site visitors and “attention” (Compete’s word for percentage of their online time people spend on a particular site). What was interesting was that Bebo was No. 9 in terms of visitors and No. 3 in terms of the amount of attention it gets from its users. “Bebo, a relatively new player in the space, has more than tripled in both unique visitors and attention from March 2006 to March 2007,” the Compete blog reports. By attracting and engaging quality traffic, the site leaps from 9th ranked in Unique Visitors to third in Attention.” Tagged, targeting mostly teens and with more than 30 million members, is No. 5 in both categories. Interestingly, BlackPlanet, targeting African Americans and with 16 million+ members, is No. 4 in Attention and not quite in the Top 10 in terms of unique visitors. Google’s Orkut, which is huge in Brazil and ranks 8th in Attention, is only 22nd in terms of site visitors.

Prevention on the social Web

A tragic teen double-suicide case in Australia underscores the importance of loved ones and caregivers monitoring what at-risk youth say in their online profiles and blogs. Two 16-year-old girls in the Melbourne area apparently killed themselves in a suicide pact, posting "their own death notice – a farewell message to their online friends" in MySpace, The Star in Malaysia reports. The Star reporter seems to be making the assumption that "the idea of suicide emerged from the Internet," but I don't think the posting of a farewell message in a social site profile necessarily indicates this was where the girls' suicidal tendencies got started. Profiles and blogs are, however, the first places parents should check for what kids are really thinking if the latter are acting strangely at home. "The likelihood of a 'depressed, disaffected and disaffiliated' young person communicating with a soulmate online is a sure thing," The Star cites an Australian professor as saying. And there is certainly the possibility that at-risk people are getting the wrong kind of reinforcement online, such as sympathy or even promotion of destructive behavior from other people with mental health issues.

Read 'Totally Wired'

In this week's issue of my newsletter, I review the new book Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, by Anastasia Goodstein. Please have a look!

Free speech on social Web: Canada

Anyone concerned about defamation on the social Web – such as school teachers and administrators – might be interested in a lawsuit filed in Canada by a businessman who says postings in a variety of sites “paint him as disreputable and as a bully.” Writing in the Toronto Star, law professor Michael Geist says that if Wayne Crookes, formerly involved with the Green Party, wins his cases against MySpace, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, among other services, they “could have a significant chilling effect on free speech in Canada.” Geists writes that “the suits would effectively require websites - including anyone who permits comments on a blog or includes links to other sites - to proactively monitor and remove content that may raise liability concerns.” Sites and bloggers would respond by dropping the option for people to add comments. He cites the US’s Child Online Protection Act of 1996, saying “courts in the US have repeatedly denied attempts to hold intermediaries liable for content posted by third parties on the grounds that a 1996 statute provided them with immunity for such postings” and concludes that Canada would do well to introduce a similar provision,” explaining why.

Obama's MySpace: Lesson for teens?

What happened this week with Barack Obama’s MySpace profile could happen to anyone, and it’s a useful illustration for people trying to understand ways cyberbullying happens on the social Web. One way: A friend sets up a blog or profile for someone. The someone begins to feel that friend is misrepresenting her and suggests maybe she should take over her own profile. The profile creator takes offense because he feels he was so nice to set things up. He changes the password so the person the profile’s about can’t have access. Friends become ex-friends, and now the page is an imposter profile, where harassment and defamation can happen. It didn’t get that bad for Barack Obama, but his campaign let some nice volunteer supporter in L.A. create the candidate’s profile and run it for more than two years, the Associated Press reports. It was pretty convincingly Obama, you can see from this amusing Los Angeles Times commentary about how the writer was getting way too many bulletins from Barack and had to delete the candidate from his Friends list. Probably not because of the L.A. Times piece but wisely, Obama’s campaign people were beginning to feel it was time to take control of the profile and asked the L.A. supporter/profile creator to hand over the password. You can read in the AP piece how a sticky situation seems to have been resolved fairly amicably – thanks to a personal call to the guy from Obama himself - but with Obama having to give up the 160,000 friends the supporter amassed for his MySpace profile while it was under the supporter’s control. That 160,000 was “about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed.” But by Wednesday evening, the Obama profile’s Friends count was back up to 20,000. In a bigger social-Web fracas this week, user-driven news site Digg.com experienced a user rebellion that could mire the site in litigation that would have the potential to put it out of business – see CBSNews.com.

How the CyberTipline works

The tips about child exploitation or child porn that the US’s CyberTipline receives 24/7 are acted on immediately. One of the Tipline’s analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children looks at what comes in via the Web (at CyberTipline.com) or phone (via 800.843.5678) and immediately looks at the threat level to a child. If it’s top-priority, the people behind the Tipline, the Center’s Exploited Child Unit, contact the parent immediately, do a search for the best help local to the case, and contact law enforcement in that jurisdiction and other relevant law enforcement agencies, including the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force if there is one in that state. “Since it started, the CyberTipline has received about 450,000 child sexual exploitation reports, about 400,000 of which involved possession, distribution and/or manufacture of child pornography,” reports the Visalia [Calif.] Times-Delta. It adds that, “during a typical week, the CyberTipline gets more than 1,000 child pornography reports. Not every tip involves illegal activity…. Some report adult pornography or simply offensive online content.

Disney's social site for tweens

Aimed at social networkers under 14, Disney Xtreme Digital will allow them to create their own “personal mini Web sites” as in MySpace only with parental controls, Reuters reports. Parents will be able to monitor interaction, and “a chat feature requires parental approval for kids to go beyond trading canned messages designed to prevent users from revealing personal information, or from using profanity.” Kids can decorate their sites with Disney characters and themes (which sounds a little juvenile for older tweens, so we’ll see). The site’s goal, Reuters says, sounds like viral marketing, actually. It’s “to create a community of kid marketers for Disney, as kids visit each other's sites and talk up Disney TV shows, characters, and products.”

MySpace, Chinese-style

Tom won’t be your friend if you join MySpace in China. A Chinese person will be, the New York Times reports. MySpace China “faces stiff competition from China’s home-grown Internet companies, including Baidu, Tencent, Sina and 51.com, as well as dozens of other MySpace.com-like Internet start-ups.” So its parent, Fox Interactive, is not going down the bumpy road other US Internet companies took in that country but rather will license the MySpace name to “Chinese entrepreneurs who understand their market.”

Closer look at mobile social networking

Phones as personal location devices. That’s one big reason why cellphones are joining computers as social networking devices (the other being that people have a lot of fun sharing media on phones). Friends and family can find each other’s physical location and get together or blog about their locations as they go. “Location-based services (LBS) represent at least a $750 million market in 2007,” reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in CBSNews.com. “Soon, thanks to Federal Communications Commission rules, all phones will be able to transmit your location. The question isn't whether you can be found, but how that information will be used and who will have access to it.” And there are other tracking technologies besides GPS for both phones and computers using instant messaging. That’s why “members of the location services industry met with Washington policy makers and other stake-holders at the April 25 event that was sponsored by the Internet Education Foundation. Although no formal proposals came out of that meeting, there was discussion about "best practices," Larry writes. Socializing by sharing media and documenting our lives on phones is the focus of the New York Times’s report this week on mobile social networking. For some data on teens sharing media with phones, see this M:Metrics study. On mobile socializing in general, see also Entrepreneur.com and Moconews.net.

Lawsuit over student's MySpace photo

A student has sued her school for denying her a teaching degree “because of a MySpace photo,” the Associated Press reports. “Millersville University [in Pennsylvania] instead granted Stacy Snyder a degree in English [instead of Education] last year after learning of her Web-published picture, which bore the caption ‘Drunken Pirate’." The AP says the dean of the Education School “accused Snyder of promoting underage drinking, the suit states.” Snyder is seeking “at least $75,000 in damages” with her federal lawsuit, the AP adds.

Schools banning music players

Where cheating’s concerned, first it was baseball caps (answers under brim), then it was cellphones (texting answers), “now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device,” the Associated Press reports. Kids can podcast (audio record) answers, store them on an iPod, Zune or Zen, and hide them “under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.” The National Association of Secondary School Principals told the AP it’s becoming a “national trend.”