[Infowarrior] - MySpace to Add Restrictions to Protect Younger Teenagers

[Richard Forno]

MySpace to Add Restrictions to Protect Younger Teenagers
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/technology/21myspace.html?pagewanted=print

Starting next week, MySpace, the popular online hangout, will make it harder
for strangers to send messages to younger teenagers.

The site, which has more than 70 million members, has been under pressure
because members are frequently subjected to lewd or inappropriate messages
and occasionally lured into dangerous real-world encounters.

The site will also stop showing advertisements for certain products ‹ like
online dating sites ‹ to those under 18.

The owner of MySpace, the News Corporation, has been working to address
concerns about the safety of the many teenage users of the site, while not
clamping down on the freewheeling and flirtatious interchanges that are the
source of its appeal.

Next week, the site will restrict how users over 18 can contact those aged
14 and 15. Older users sending a message asking to become friends with
younger users will have to enter the recipients' actual first and last names
or their e-mail addresses, rather than simply their user names.

The new policy still allows people under 18 to send messages to those under
16 without knowing their full names or e-mail addresses.

"A lot of 14- and 15-year-olds are friends in school with 16- and
17-year-olds," said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of News
Corporation's Internet unit. "We want to balance the openness of our
community with the interest of protecting the member."

Mr. Nigam declined to say how often strangers made such contact with people
under 16 or whether such contacts figure into any of the cases where
predators have used MySpace.

MySpace will also start to allow all members to designate their profiles as
private and thus available only to their named list of friends. MySpace had
allowed and encouraged those under 16 to set their profiles to be private,
but profiles of anyone older than that have been available for any visitor
to the site to read.

Parry Aftab, the executive director of WiredSafety, a group that promotes
online privacy for young people, dismissed the change in the contact rules
for those under 16 as ineffectual.

"Kids that want to do the open stuff will set their ages to 16," she said.
MySpace does not verify users' ages.

But Ms. Aftab praised the change that allows anyone to have a private
profile. "I know adults who set their age to be 14," she said, "not to lure
kids, but because they want their profiles private."