What is MySpace?
Myspace is a free online community composed of personal profiles focused on younger membership. The profile on the web usually contains a digital photo and detailed information about the personal interests of the member. The amount of details contained in the profile is on the user and filed voluntarily. MySpace policy requires users to join for at least 14 years. Members routinely send messages and "network" or socialize within the community. Although the domain proved to be incredibly popular and reportedly hosted over 60 million profiles, it also got under fire. It is concerned that the vast majority of members can be too inexperienced to realize the potential risk of publishing personal data online. Some profiles include not only a picture, but the first and the surname of the user, the location and details such as favorite music and food. This information allows the predator to easily target and make friends with the victim.
Members of MySpace may also decide to fill out "survey". The survey asks questions as it is, whether a member ever had sex, skinny, smoked, drunk alcohol or used drugs. Members who publish in MySpace expect their profiles to read children at their own age often explain suggestive answers and management's leadership typical of Bravado. Provocative or not, these profiles provide "protected" hunting ground, where potential predators can choose, trace and friends, invisible. The predator, which is strengthened by a wealth of personal data, can easily manipulate the potential victim into a false sense of security and acquaintance, while completely distorting through his own false profile. Although they are disabled on the web, false profiles are impossible to prevent the framework.
In some cases, Myspace members will apply when they are requested. For example, in February 2006 CBS announced that a fourteen -year -old girl was addressed to sex, although 38 -year -old Myspace man. The man was subsequently arrested when the police took over the girl's identity while he unknowingly continued to request sex.
The other Myspace members were not so lucky. Several reports from all over the US have combined a website with children who were either murdered or disappeared. Just before the 14 -year -old Judy Cajuste of New Jersey was murdered in January 2006, the girl apparently told her friends that she had met my MySpace man at the age of 20. Similarly, 15 -year -old Kayla Reed from Northern California was reportedly an active member of the place until she disappeared on 2 December 2005. Her body was found seven weeks later, the victim of the murder.
While the connection of these and many other messages to MySpace can only be random, the result is a problembling. Given growing concerns in April 2006, MySpace announced that it will start serving public information on advertising focused on education of its users. Banner ads are part of a larger campaign that began in 2004, initiated by the National CentREM for missing and exploited children. In addition, since May 1, 2006, Hemanshu Nigan, a former federal prosecutor specializing in the exploitation of children, supervised the security division of MySpace. Nigan previously worked for Microsoft Corporation and developed computer strategies for better protection of children.
Regardless of the fact that online security strategies are well recommended to parents to protect their children from online predators.