MySpace.com is planning new restrictions on how adults may contact its younger users in response to growing concerns about the safety of teenagers who frequent the popular online social networking site.

The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts and displays only partial profiles for those registered as 14- or 15-years-old unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teen’s list of friends.

Under the changes, announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old’s friends’ list unless they already know either the youth’s e-mail address or full name.

Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth’s list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over. 

The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.

But MySpace doesn’t check the truth in the profiles.

“A 12-year-old who uses MySpace told me on Friday you can always tell if someone’s older than they say they are because the first thing they ask you is your bra size,” Parry Aftab, executive director of Wiredsafety.org, said on CBS News’ The Early Show

Aftab told co-anchor Hannah Storm MySpace isn’t making enough of an effort to protect children online.

“I’m holding a summit in White Plains, N.Y., today where everybody but MySpace is coming to sit down and figure out what the we can all do, Parents, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo, [other online sites catering to teens], all of the other sites are sitting in a room with regulators and the FTC and everyone else to see what we can do to keep kids safer,” Aftab said.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has grown astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. The site currently has some 87 million users, about a quarter registered as minors, according to the company.

At MySpace, which was bought last year by News Corp. for $580 million, users can expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.

It offers a mix of features — message boards, games, Web journals — designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages.

MySpace has recently become a target of parents, schools and law enforcement officials concerned that teens who hang out at MySpace can fall victim to sexual predators.

“MySpace has been under enormous pressure for months and the pressure is growing now that it’s being sued for by 14-year-old who was allegedly sexually assaulted by an adult who misrepresented his age,” says Magid.

The girl, in the suit filed this week, is seeking $30 million in damages. And earlier this month, a 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport flew to the Mideast to be with a 20-year-old man she met through MySpace. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded the teen to turn around and go home.

MySpace officials say the new restrictions have been long planned and are unrelated to recent events.

Besides the contact restrictions, all users — not just those 14 and 15 — will have the option to make only partial profiles available to those not already on their friends list.

All users also will get an option to prevent contact from people outside their age group. Currently, they may only choose to require that a person know their e-mail or last name first; that will remain an option to those 16 and over, even as it becomes mandatory for those younger.

MySpace also will beef up its ad-targeting technology, so that it can avoid displaying gambling and other adult-themed sites on minors’ profile pages and target special public-service announcements to them.

The changes follow a number of safety-related measures that includes the hiring of a former federal prosecutor and Microsoft Corp. executive as its online safety chief. MySpace already has developed safety tips for parents and children and devotes scores of employees to monitoring the site around the clock.

Children’s safety online shouldn’t be left solely to services like MySpace, says Aftab, who offered tips earlier this year on The Early Show.

“Parents have to be involved. Ask their kids if they have a MySpace or other social networking page, tell them you want to look at it tomorrow, giving them a chance to clean it up,” Aftab told Storm Wednesday. “If your kids aren’t listening to you, and you’ve set rules that you like, it’s time to unplug the computer.”

“I need somebody to be the parent in the house.”

In the 3 1/2 years this column has run, Mike Sullivan is the first person to be profiled twice.

When I wrote about him three years ago, Sullivan was the detective in charge of the Naperville Police Department’s Internet crimes unit. Today, he helps run the high-tech crimes bureau for the Illinois attorney general’s office, concentrating 100 percent of his time on Internet child exploitation.

This means that every day, Sullivan works on these horrors: “Child pornography, solicitation for sex, performing sexual acts with a child, videotaping or engaging a child to videotape himself during sex,” he listed. “Also, harassment, stalking and cyber-bullying.”

In three years, the technology sexual predators have at their disposal has advanced dramatically.

Community sites like MySpace.com, Xenga.com and Tagged.com are popular among kids and serve as a detailed menu for predators.

“It’s not anonymous chat anymore like it was three years ago,” Sullivan explained. “These sites have documentation of maybe a year of a child’s life. There are pictures, hobbies, likes and dislikes.”

Also, the price of hardware commonly used for child exploitation has plummeted.

“Three years ago, Web cameras cost $100, today they’re $10,” he said about the small, stationary video cameras that connect to PCs. “Camera-enabled cell phones weren’t around three years ago. Digital cameras cost a lot more.”

Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan compares today’s technology with an even earlier era:

“When I was growing up, you always had Officer Friendly come talking about Stranger Danger and the guy that was going to flash you in the park,” Madigan recalled. “Now all these predators are on the Internet. Kids are being abducted. Kids are being raped. Technology has allowed criminals to do unthinkable things.”

Thankfully, the technology used capture these criminals has progressed equally dramatically.

Consider the story of Taylor March, who ran a day-care center in her Minonk, Ill., home.

Last year, March boasted in a Yahoo chat room that she was going to broadcast herself molesting a toddler through her Web camera. There were six children in her home at the time.

An Ohio police officer was in the chat room. From the offender’s Internet protocol address, he knew she was in Illinois. The officer called Sullivan’s office.

“Within 10-15 minutes, we were able to ID her and actually capture an image of the woman via her own Web cam,” Sullivan said. “We then sent it to the Minonk police chief.”

Total time elapsed between Taylor’s boast and police walking into her house: a couple of hours.

“It should have been quicker,” said Sullivan. “Unfortunately, even with us being that quick with it, she was able to molest one child.”

The fast communication between the police agencies is a result of the Internet Crimes Against Children task force, to which the Ohio officer belonged. The task force operates in 46 states.

In Illinois, 50 federal, state and local agencies are members (www.illinoisicac.org). The coordinator: Michael Sullivan.

What can parents do to keep their children safe?

“The No. 1 thing I would tell parents is that a sexual predator’s strongest weapon online is secrecy,” said Sullivan. “And a parents’ strongest weapon against sexual predators is communication.”

There’s a “grooming” that takes place when a predator prepares a child for exploitation.

“It’s the same grooming sex predators have used for decades. What they want to do is create a friendship with a child.” And, with it, the secrecy.

“He’ll say things like, `This is our secret. You can trust me. You don’t tell anyone. I won’t tell anyone.’”

The best thing parents can do, Sullivan said, is a decidedly low-tech activity: talk to your kids.

“Sit down with them. Let them show you how they search. Ask them what sites they have created. But keep in mind while you’re doing this: do not overreact. The worst thing you can do is put it into their minds that you’re going to be mad at them, punish them, or you’re going to take the computer away.”

Also, look at what they use for their screen name. See if they’re using their home address. “Explain to them how this might be harmful,” Sullivan said.

And if the kids insist on privacy and refuse to share the information?

“Kids aren’t as slick as they think they are,” Sullivan replied seriously.

“Search the community sites for them yourself. So if you search for `Emily’ on MySpace, you might not find your daughter. But if you search for 14-year-olds in the junior high your daughter currently attends, you may find her. Kids tend to list their school and their home town on these sites.”

Also, you can check their instant-messaging programs, which usually open with the user name already entered. Sullivan finds that kids usually use the same screen name on IM applications as they do on community Web sites.

Another trick: Go to MySpace and start by typing a single letter in the log-in name field. If your child uses the site, the Web browser will auto-complete the name, which you can then search for.

Finally, check out your own computer’s hard drive: Look for temporary Internet files and, especially, cookies. All of the popular social networking sites use cookies.

In addition to open communication, Madigan plans to use a low-tech approach when her 17-month-old daughter is of “Internet age.”

“We’re going to keep the computer that has Internet access in a public part of the house,” Madigan said. “It will be where I and my husband are walking around. Almost 100 percent of the kids that get into trouble have Internet access in their room behind a closed door.”

She added: “It’s OK to have a computer in their bedroom. Just not a computer connected to the Internet.”

Which makes centuries-old, common sense parenting techniques the best preventative measures against high-tech crimes against children.

A Jacksonville, FL man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet. The victim says he chatted online with a woman, known on her MySpace.com profile as “Natalia”, for two weeks before deciding to meet with her. He says her prfile showed sexy photos, and a blurb which said “just lookin’ for something fun”. That brief, friendly description was all he knew about her before they planned to meet.

PALMDALE, Calif. — Postings on the popular Web site Myspace.com have led the parents of a missing Illinois girl and a private investigator to believe that she may be in Southern California. 

Jessica Liccar, 16, of Crete, Ill., has been missing since June 2 when she crashed the family car. 

The girl was taken to a hospital but released before her parents arrived and hasn’t been seen since. 

Liccar’s parents believe she is traveling with 17-year-old Simon Sotheras, and postings on the social networking site revealed information that the pair may be in the Palmdale-Lancaster, Calif., area. 

Liccar is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 140 pounds. She has reddish-brown hair and braces. Her possible companion is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds. 

Anyone with information is asked to call 800-487-0947, ext. 9.

A 16-year-old girl from Detroit, who tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew to the Mideast to be with a man she met on MySpace.com has returned to Michigan.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded Katherine R. Lester to turn around and go home before she reached the West Bank. Lester arrived at Bishop International Airport in Flint late Friday and was taken to a private area to be reunited with her family.

She disappeared Monday after talking her parents into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada with friends, sheriff’s officials said.

She apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, Undersheriff James Jashinske said.

MySpace.com is a social networking Web site with more than 72 million members that lets users post photos, blogs and journals. It is owned by the same parent company, News Corp., that owns FOX News. There have been scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they met through the site.

Lester apparently contacted the man from Jericho about three months ago, Jashinske said. Jericho, a city of 17,000, is a relatively calm area of the volatile West Bank.

The FBI traced the teenager to a Wednesday flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Tel Aviv, Israel. At a scheduled stop in Amman, Jordan, U.S. officials persuaded her to return home, FBI agent Robert Beeckman said.

“Thank God she was returned safely,” Lester’s father said Friday afternoon while awaiting her arrival.

Terry Lester said his daughter is a straight-A student and student council member. “She’s a good girl. Never had a problem with her,” he said.

MySpace forbids youngsters 13 and under from joining and provides special protections for those 14 and 15 — only people on their list of friends can view their profiles. Older users also have the option of restricting certain personal data so it can be seen only by people they have identified as friends.

Shawn Lester told The Saginaw News that her daughter has “never given me a day’s trouble. … I just don’t understand with all these new laws protecting America how a 16-year-old kid could get out of the country.” She said her daughter never had a boyfriend and seemed to be content with that.

Katherine and her mother live in Gilford, a village about 80 miles north of Detroit in Michigan’s agricultural Thumb region. Her father lives in Grand Blanc Township.

Jashinske said deputies confiscated the family’s home computer and were taking it to the FBI’s Bay City office for analysis. He said it remained unclear whether any laws had been violated because of Lester’s age. The age of sexual consent in Michigan is 16; Katherine turns 17 on June 21.

“I’ll be honest with you, we don’t know if a crime’s been committed,” Jashinske said.

The Grand Forks School District has blocked the popular MySpace.com Web site on its computers, citing safety concerns and negative behavior nationwide linked to the site, including bullying and stalking.

“Outside of our schools, adults posing as youth have gained access to student chat rooms, which has led to tragedy in some cases,” said an April letter to parents signed by Ron Gruwell, assistant superintendent for secondary education, and Jody Thompson, assistant superintendent for elementary education, for the Grand Forks schools.

“Unsuspecting students have posted enough personal information that predators are able to locate their home or school address, thus becoming easy targets for predators.”

The Web site has become a favorite of child predators, cyber bullies and con artists, the letter said. Also, children, mostly ages 9 to 14, use the anonymity of the Web to post messages about others that would not be said face-to-face, the letter said. It went on to urge parents to talk to their children about MySpace, and to go to the site and register.

“Parents should be aware of what their children are writing and what others are posting on their Web sites,” the letter said.

MELBOURNE, Fla. — A picture on a MySpace website brought police to the door of a Melbourne family’s apartment and now it could put that family out on the street. The pictures of a 14-year-old with two BB guns tucked into his shorts prompted a neighbor to call police and the landlord.

Now, because of the pictures, the teenager’s family has been given seven days to get out of their apartment at Sable Palms.

Nico Portis’ mom knew he had a MySpace page and knew he had a BB gun, a gift from his aunt. But, she didn’t know the combination of the two could cause so much trouble.

Nico said he spends about four hours a day on MySpace. It was his space on the popular website that may ultimately cost his family their home. A picture of him with two BB guns tucked into his waistband and another picture of an arsenal of weapons were the final straw for the managers of the Sable Palms Apartment.

When another resident saw it, Portis’ family was given seven days to get out. His mother was astounded.

“Never ever, never in my life. I never would imagine that a MySpace page would even go to that extreme, never,” said Kecia Williams, Nico’s mother.

The manager of the complex was not permitted to discuss the case on camera, but said there were numerous other violations of the lease, including a guest of her son’s who was arrested for burglarizing another apartment. The manager said the MySpace photos were just the last straw.

Williams said her son was unfairly targeted.

“Every time there is, like, an incident, it’s basically like your son did this or your son did that,” she said.

She also said no one in her home has been arrested and when the police came out to investigate the pictures on the MySpace website, they found nothing illegal. The picture of the arsenal had been pulled off another website.

“Anybody can put anything they want on MySpace. Why was he targeted? That’s what I want to know,” Williams said.

Williams is already challenging the termination of the lease. The manager said if she does and loses, it could be much harder for her family to find another home.

Williams said she forced her son to take the pictures off of his websites and when the police were there she asked them to confiscate the BB gun, which they did. They are waiting to see what will happen with their apartment next.

Southridge High School officials suspended six students Tuesday in connection with threats on the MySpace Web site.

The online activity, which started with an electronic posting attacking Goth students at the school, led to an exchange of violent threats.

On Tuesday, police officers who patrolled the school reported no violence, said Maureen Wheeler, Beaverton School District spokeswoman. However, Wheeler said, more students may be suspended as Southridge leaders continue to investigate.

Tuesday’s suspensions fall under the district’s broad harassment and disruptive behavior policy, which kicks in when an action disrupts learning.

School officials learned last week that one student had started an online forum attacking the Goth students, a group recognizable by their dark clothing and, at times, heavy makeup.

MySpace, an online network for young adults, allows members to create personal Web pages, host blogs and open discussion groups.

The forum turned into a hostile online exchange as more students logged on, said Randy Kayfes, the district’s public safety director. The back-and-forth fueled rumors that one group planned to retaliate against the other Tuesday, 06-06-06. The number 666 is often associated with biblical warnings of the Apocalypse.

“The rumors morphed and changed, and eventually it got so you couldn’t tell who said what,” Kayfes said.

Police and school officials were unable to identify a specific threat but beefed up security anyway. Beaverton police stationed two uniformed officers at the Southridge campus all day. Nearby Conestoga Middle School officials also warned parents of the concerns.

Some parents kept their children home. The district received a flood of phone calls about the rumors, Kayfes said. Southridge officials recorded 250 absences Tuesday, slightly more than average.

Wheeler said district computers block access to MySpace, which has been at the center of conflicts at schools across the country.

“Students can still get on at home,” Wheeler said of the Web site. “We have no control over it.”

Microsoft plans to give its MSN Spaces blog publishing and hosting service new social networking features, as well as support for the company’s lightweight applications called Gadgets.

The new social networking features are being tested by MSN Spaces users in Australia and the Netherlands, and are designed to foster user interaction, says Karin Muskopf, MSN product manager.

“We’ve heard from our customers they want to be able to see who their friends are talking to, because they feel those people would have similar interests to theirs. They want to be connected to people who are like-minded,” she says.

She declined to comment specifically about social networking competitors, but News’s MySpace has revolutionised this market with its eye-popping popularity. Beloved by teenagers and young adults, MySpace ranks second only to Yahoo in page views in the US, and drew almost 5% of all web site visits in March, ahead even of mighty Google, which drew little over 4%, according to Hitwise. MySpace currently has more than 73 million registered users worldwide, and adds about 250,000 new ones every day.

MySpace’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed by large providers of online services such as Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo. Google has an invitation-only social network called Orkut and Yahoo has a blogging service called Yahoo 360. AOL recently launched AOL Pages, a social networking service tied to its AIM instant messaging service.

Ironically, MSN Spaces may also end up competing with Wallop, a startup that is developing a social networking service with technology Microsoft spun off from its research unit. Wallop plans to launch its service this year.

MSN Spaces, launched in December 2004, has always allowed users to link to other blogs on the network. But the plan now is to make this easier to do and more attractive, by letting users add a section to their blogs where they can build a gallery of “friends” who also have MSN Spaces blogs.

While this functionality is now limited to a simple hyperlink, entries in this new gallery will contain much more information about the friends, even including notes and tags the user can add about them. The social networking features will also be integrated with Microsoft’s instant message service.

The tests in Australia and the Netherlands have been going well and Microsoft plans to extend this functionality to users in other countries in the coming months, Muskopf says.

It makes sense for Microsoft to try to leverage the sizable MSN Spaces audience to go deeper into social networking. About 40 million people have set up MSN Spaces blogs, and the network receives about 120 million unique users per month, she says. Around 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day for a total so far of about 2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, MSN Spaces will also gain support for Microsoft’s Gadgets, the lightweight applications introduced last year as a way to extend the functionality of larger desktop and web-based applications. Microsoft provides a website where developers can find information on how to build these mini-applications. Muskopf declined to provide details on how Gadgets will be supported within MSN Spaces.

MySpace.com is described as an Internet site devoted to social networking. Any rational adult who’s spent more than a few minutes on MySpace might well conclude that it, like much of cyberspace, appeals to the lowest common denominator. I won’t bore – or repulse – you with specifics. Let’s just say that you probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with your mother, unless mumsie is Madonna, visiting many MySpace pages.

Tasteless photos and cartoons and deviant thoughts litter the website. Catchphrases rule. Banal ideas are expressed in crude English.

There are folks, often women, seen in shopping malls carrying on lengthy cell phone conversations. You might ask, as I have, is there really another person on the other end of that long, mind-numbing conversation? Hearing snippets of chatter along the lines of “I just had a taco, I like tacos, do you like tacos?, what are you eating?,” I’ve sometimes wondered where in the world the callers find anyone willing to put up with such extended blather.

Now I think I know. My guess is that they get their phone buddies on MySpace. There are some very lonely people there.
Obviously, MySpace isn’t my place. But some adults might find what they’re looking for there, and that’s their business. Unless, of course, if what they’re looking for is a child to molest.

The biggest problem is that MySpace, which claims to be “a place for friends,” has become a playground for sexual predators. To register, a user only has to be at least 14 years of age. That restriction is easily ignored. There have been numerous reports of crimes and attempted crimes against children in which the site has played a role.

MySpace may be a victim of its own success. With a reported user base in the tens of millions and a quarter of a million people signing up daily, the three-year old site may not have been prepared for the abuses it’s experienced.

In April, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Advertising Council, and News Corporation, which owns MySpace, started running public service advertisements intended to raise awareness of Internet safety. In May, a law targeting “social networks” and Internet chat rooms was proposed in Congress. The legislation would block access to those sites in federally funded schools and libraries.

Many schools have already decided on their own to limit access on their computers. In a move that was guaranteed to fan the flames of teen outrage, a school district in Illinois recently took action to hold students accountable for what they post on websites such as MySpace. Actions like that are usually condemned as censorship. To which the appropriate response may well be, so what? Children don’t have the same rights as adults. And acting goofy online at taxpayer expense isn’t constitutionally protected, no matter what the ACLU may claim.

On the other hand, regulating access to social networking sites is much easier said than done. One need not have the technological prowess of Internet inventor Al Gore to circumvent many blocking measures. Add to that the government’s general clumsiness in securing whatever results it intends and there realistically isn’t much reason to think that legislation will have a great impact.

If there’s going to be anything close to a resolution of the problems inherent to MySpace and similar sites, it’ll have to be initiated by parents. Knowing where children go on the Internet, what they do there, and with whom they communicate are essential. There is monitoring software that can help.

Kids might scream about their privacy being violated, but families aren’t democracies. They’re dictatorships and part of a parent’s responsibility is to protect their children as best they can for as long as they can.

Last month a reporter wrote in the Los Angeles Times that she’d covered many disquieting events in her career, “But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com.”

MySpace isn’t for everyone. We can only hope enough parents realize that in time.