This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Legislation, Safety Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Who’s in your chat?
Applause for MySpace Changes
The people behind MySpace are taking aim at cyber-bullies and online predators with their new regulations. Their goal is to try and help protect minors from some of the hazards they face online. Police, educators, legislator and parents are applauding the effort.
Although these regulations are only a small piece of the safety puzzle they may help. Parents must provide the majority of safety pieces with supervision, rules, and discussions with their little online users. But now parents have a hand from MySpace.
With MySpace now adding an e-mail registry, parents can prevent their child from signing up for an account by reporting their e-mail address. Although this may not be a big security feature since many computer savvy children can easily create new e-mail account it is a step in the right direction.
MySpace is also taking new measures to verify the age of their users. Those users under 16 will have their page set to private in order to prevent stranger from viewing their information and if anyone over 18 wishes to add them as a friend they must be able to verify their name or e-mail address.
MySpace is also checking to see if any registered sex offenders have pages. They would be deleted but this wouldn’t prevent them from using MySpace since anyone can open an account without using their actual identity.
Really the only way to help keep children safe from online abuses is constant parental supervision, an open dialog with children about online safety, and care in what you send out online, from personal information to online photos.
One Response to “Applause for MySpace Changes”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 21st, 2008 at 1:55 pm
[…] post by LadyBug Similar Posts Teaching Online Safety Through Classroom Blogging Online Predators - Are You […]