News for the Week of June 18, 2006
Safety in teen social networking was the focus of kid-tech news this week - partly because of a milestone conference in Washington on 6/22. Hosted by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the meeting brings together social-networking companies, law enforcement, children’s advocates, and educators for a “dialogue” on this subject. Here are news stories that fueled the discussion:
MySpace’s new safety features
Starting next week, it’ll be harder for adult users to contact teens on MySpace, and all 85 million+ MySpace users - regardless of age - will be able to make their profiles private, Reuters reports. Members registered as 18 or over will have to know the email or first and last name of any 14- to 15-year-old member whom they want to contact, according to Reuters, or rather people who are registered as being 14 and 15. There is no age verification in place on social-networking sites to date. According to the New York Times, MySpace “will also stop showing advertisements for certain products - like online dating sites - to those under 18.”
Teen sues MySpace
In the first lawsuit we’ve seen against MySpace by a teen user, a 14-year-old
in Texas is suing MySpace for $30 million, saying she was sexually assaulted
by a 19-year-old she "met" on the site, the
Associated Press reports. According to MTV News
In Other News...
- Social activism networking for teens. We’re seeing a trend you might call niche social networking. There’s the whole passel of family blogging, photo-sharing, and networking sites, a few examples of religion-based social networking, the social sites revolving around specific music genre, and our own BlogSafety.com (social networking for parents who want to talk about social networking!). Today a very interesting new category: social networking for social change. The category’s first site: YouthNoise.com, a project of Save the Children (here’s their press release. This is an exciting development, don’t you think? “YouthNoise launches with more than 113,000 registered users from all 50 US states and more than 170 countries worldwide and averages approximately 3 million page views per month, which is comparable to the most popular teen Web sites. A recent study demonstrated that participation in YouthNoise yields a 25% increase in volunteering and a 90% increase in the global awareness of users from ‘modestly aware’ to ‘highly aware’."
- La. videogame law on hold. A federal judge in Baton Rouge “granted a temporary stay on a new Louisiana law signed last week that would outlaw the sale of violent video games to children under 18,” eCommerceTimes reports. The videogame industry’s trade association and the Entertainment Merchants Association both challenged the law, which “calls for a fine of $2,000 or one-year prison term - or both - for violators.” The law’s opponents told the court that similar laws had been struck down in six other jurisdictions over the past five years on constitutional (free-speech) grounds.
- Online kids & ‘personal boundaries’: Can your kids be grouped in here: “With personal lives dominated by gadgets, young people are paying more attention to their virtual worlds than the real one.” That’s the email tease to a USATODAY story today that leads with: “Julie Beasley looked out her window one morning and saw a teenager changing clothes in the middle of the street.” The story quotes psychologists as saying our kids are a generation with different concepts of privacy and “personal boundaries” than previous generations’. Is that your experience too, parents, or does every generation of parents think its children are more [fill in the blank] than ever before? Here’s something to think about, though: USATODAY says MIT psychologist/sociologist Sherry Turkle “believes [this generation’s] infatuation with technology will lessen, and people will be better able to balance the real and the virtual parts of their lives.”
