Interesting WSJ article today about MySpace's attempt to appease nervous parents. The software is called "Zephyr" and it allows parents to monitor when their children change age, name, or location in their MySpace profiles.
I doubt this will be very effective since < 50% of parents even utilize parental controls or filters that come standard as part of most ISP packages. Why would this be any different. What's more, this software does not allow parents to read incoming and outgoing email messages. While kids would hate this (and will hate Zephyr), they should at least offer it as an option to parents. Email and chat communications is where all the predatory behavior could be spotted and prevented.
Even with this offering, it doesn't satisfy the attorneys general that have sued MySpace. The main bone of contention there is MySpace refuses to increase the minimum account age from 14 to 16.
Also, as the article calls out, this is still much less secure than FaceBook which does not allow you to access a community that you don't belong to (i.e. without a valid Harvard email domain, one cannot access the Harvard FaceBook community).
Seems like MySpace is trying to throw something out there that gives them the appearance of making their community more safe. In actuality, it does very, very little to improve security.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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As a corollary to the last post, a lawsuit against MySpace by parents whose children were sexually abused by people they met on MySpace.
MySpace is kidding themselves if they think Zephyr will somehow make this a "safe" site.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/18/technology/myspace_lawsuits/index.htm?cnn=yes
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