1. MySpace and Online Safety Brian Boies

2. Agenda  What is MySpace?  Dangers and Realities  Safety Tips

3. What is MySpace?  “MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. MySpace also features an internal search engine and an internal e- mail system.” Wikipedia.org

4. What does that really mean?  A constant, fluid yearbook or an interactive social resume  Obvious measure of popularity  Most viewed website in U.S.  60 Million Monthly Users  Social networking is here to stay

5.  Well over 100 Million accounts  230,000 new accounts daily  Obviously hard to police  Myspace is by far (80%) the most popular social networking site (others are friendster and facebook)  Age limit of 14 years

6. In Myspace’s own words it’s for:  Friends who want to talk Online  Single people who want to meet other Singles  Matchmakers who want to connect their friends with other friends  Families who want to keep in touch-- map your Family Tree  Business people and co-workers interested in networking  Classmates and study partners  Anyone looking for long lost friends!

11. Next Steps

20. Dangers and Realities Context: 70-90% of childhood sexual abuse is committed by “people known to the children”. -Internet sex crimes make up only 1-2% of all sex crimes against children -Challenge to look through the hype and the easy targets to do a realistic risk assesment

21.  In most cases exploitation is considered consensual by the minor  5% of offenders tried to deceive their victims and 21% misrepresented their sexual motives  See handout: how predators groom their victims

22. Safety Tips  Keep your identity private (might also keep parents from seeing what’s going on)  Never get together with someone you “meet” online  Never respond to any type of message that is hostile or otherwise makes you uncomfortable  Be wary of anyone you don’t already know in person

23.  If you don’t respond to someone they can’t hurt you  Make sure you know how to report abuse  Don’t share password with anyone (your friends now may not be your friends next week)  Have as little personal information as possible for public viewing  Be honest about age  At home, place computer in central, open area, not child’s room

24.  Easy for kids to do it on their own (either through new account on myspace or another site such as facebook) so keep communication open.

25. Safer option: imbee.com for 8-14 year olds