Myspace privacy

So i have been hearing a lot about Myspace recently and the problems with privacy as well as chilidren being stalked by "predators." So when looking into this issue i found an online article written by Marcy Zitz, in this article Marcy discusses the pros and cons of myspace. she says, "You may not have heard about the "secret" society called MySpace. Almost everyone in school has a MySpace page that lists everything about themselves and chances are your child has been encouraged to create one. T'weens are told how to bypass the rules so they can get a page even though they aren't old enough. They are a fun way to share information about yourself and post pictures but they can be dangerous for kids, including teens." this just being a breif discription about what myspace is. She goes on to say what things get posted on Myspace, the requirements for Myspace, and of corse the dangers about Myspace. This is what Marcy has to say on the dangers of Myspace, "Your child can easily post enough information about themselves to be abducted. An online predator looking at your child's page has enough information to arrive at your door or the playground that your child frequents. You must teach your child the dangers of posting too much information and you must follow up to make sure they aren't posting too much information.

Another problem is that children tend to post things that should never be put in print. They say things like they want to burn down the school or they want to kill so-and-so with not literally meaning it but threats like that could be taken seriously.

MySpace is for kids over 14 years of age. There is sexually explicit information on the site posted by other users and the profile questions that users create is geared towards adults." In this article she briefly talks about the parents and how they need to get more involved, but I think that there needs to be more to it then that. For example parents need to take time out of their day to simply talk to their kids, not entirely about Myspace, but also what is going on in their lives, what is going on at school, take interest in their extra corricular activities. Becuase a lot of the time of Myspace is used by kids to bitch and moan about all the things a wrong in their lives (whihc for the most part there normally isnt anything wrong in the first place). so parents need to not online talk to their kids about Myspace and about what they are posting on it but know their children, talk to them, eat dinner as a family, simple things like that.