POS (That's Parents over Shoulder)
Why
you need to peek, and how you can keep kids safe online
|
|
|
By JOAN BENSON-CACCHIONE |
What a relief! Lora Caldwell had just found out that people can't leave
comments on her daughter's MySpace page unless the
daughter sets it up that way.
But the profile page itself? The online screen that she could easily fill with
her name, revealing photos of herself, details about her school, her plans for
the weekend and all of that gossip kids so casually spew on MySpace?
Wide open.
"Like a big catalog, open to anyone on the Web," Thomas Del Fratte said in his recent talk about Internet safety to
parents in the
What a nightmare.
Scary surprises
"Parents need to know that just because kids are at home doesn't mean they
are safe,"
Del Fratte, supervisor of information technology in
the
At any given moment, kids are just a few clicks away from as many as 50,000
sexual predators online.
One in five children who use Internet chat rooms report
having been approached by an Internet predator.
In the past year in
"The World Wide Web is wonderful. But it's also scary,"said
Millcreek School District Superintendent Dean Maynard. "Most of us left the i-Safe workshop in
shock."
Surprising, too, is just how fast online social networking via sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and LiveJournal has caught
on with kids.
Two sites in particular have soared in growth just in the past year. Accounts
on MySpace grew by 318 percent. Use of Facebook.com,
a similar site for college students, jumped 271 percent. Users number in the
tens of millions.
What kids risk
Most kids like posting on MySpace
for innocent enough reasons: to stay connected with grade-school pals, get to
know friends better or as a means to eliminate boredom, said Kathleen Noce, a professor at Penn State Behrend.
Lots of kids limit the people they allow on their space to friends they know
well. They're also discreet and careful with identifying details. Some of it is
"harmless," Noce said.
The real danger arises when kids allow anyone access to their space, "when
they list details about who they are, where they go to school, what they are
doing ... this weekend and communicate with anyone they've allowed on their
space," she said.
Noce, who has a daughter in high school, did a search
of some local schools on MySpace. She found kids
who'd gone to grade school and junior high school with her daughter.
On their pages, she could link to other kids who'd posted pictures of
themselves at parties, in bathing suits and pajamas.
"I saw provocative pictures and conversations and plans being made to do
things on the weekend," said Noce.
Even more alarming, she saw pictures of her daughter on other MySpace pages. Those pictures can be removed only by the
person who set up the account. (Site administrators can dismantle accounts.)
Noce went further. She set up a phony MySpace account, posing as a 15-year-old girl. Close to 20
messages promptly clogged the inbox of an e-mail address she listed. Notes
ranged from, "Hey, you wanna hook up?" to
"I wanna get on your myspace
and be your friend."
"You don't know who these people are. The world has access to you"
there, Noce said.
'Parents don't know enough'
Noce, who teaches management information systems at Behrend, clearly understands the Internet as a marvelous
and essential tool. "Technology is a way of life now," she said.
But as a parent, some aspects of it scare her.
It doesn't surprise those who study the Internet that kids don't generally
share that apprehension.
"These kids are digital natives," Del Fratte
said. The millennials -- roughly defined as those
born between 1980 and 2000 -- have grown up with the online culture and are
completely at ease with it.
Consequently, the millennials "are often unaware
of, or indifferent to, the consequences of their use of technology," Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life
Project, said at a conference in
Add to shifting behaviors and expectations the fact that kids tend to think
they're invincible, Del Fratte said, and you have a
dangerous mix. MySpace lists tips to use the site
wisely, but plenty of kids ignore them.
So if kids have no real grasp of the risks they take online, parents must.
"Too many parents don't know enough," Noce
said.
Jeff Natalie agrees.
"Because these resources weren't present for them as children, (parents)
need to get up to speed" with what's taking place online, said Natalie, a
licensed social worker.
Learn as much as possible. Monitor what's going on.
"Am I going to be lurking about in a cloak-and-dagger kind of way?"
said Natalie. "You better believe I am."
Parents can then be cordial and civil in discussions of parental surveillance,
he said --even if kids explode, saying they're being unfair.
"I can deal with the huffs and puffs of an adolescent," Natalie said.
"I can't deal with a dead kid."
@ For more information, go to www.eriekids.com