What Your Kids Are Doing on MySpace

MySpace is a social networking Web site designed to help people meet one another, reconnect with old friends, or simply stay in touch with current friends. There are many different features and options on the site, making MySpace a highly customizable Web space, with each user having a unique experience. To follow is a basic overview of the various elements in MySpace, and what you need to know as a parent to ensure that your children are staying safe.

The Profile Page
Every MySpace user has a profile page. This page can be extremely simple or highly complex. The basic profile contains the user's first name (or nickname), location, age, relationship status, interests, and who they would like to meet. Users can also add their favorite books, movies, television shows, and their "heroes". Users can ehance their pages with songs from their favorite artists and videos taken from YouTube or another video source.

MySpace users can make their profiles as vauge and simple or as detailed and complex as they choose. Some people prefer to stick to very basic information at the risk of revealing too much about their personal lives over the Internet. Others choose to include very specific details of their lives.

As a parent, you should ask to see your child's MySpace profile. Have them give you the link, or if the profile is private (more on this later) then have them show you their profile every few weeks. If you suspect that your child has a MySpace profile that he/she isn't showing you, you can log onto MySpace.com yourself and perform a "search" using your child's first and last name or e-mail address.

Why would your child want to keep their profile secret from you? Many teens lput sexual content on their profiles, including pictures of themselves in erotic poses. Your son might have photos of himself in erotic poses with teenage girls. Your daughter might have photos of herself in a bikini or even lingerie. The danger of putting sexual content on a profile page, particularly for teenage girls, is that it can attract predators, who may be posing to be innocent teenage boys. Be sure to talk to your children about these risks, and that on the Internet, it's easy to create false identities and pretend to be someone you are not.

Photos
MySpace users can post up to 300 photos of themselves in the photo section, and even more on their profile page if they know anything about HTML. People often post pictures of themselves in social situations, doing crazy things, to make it appear as if they are popular and have a good social life. However, many young women post erotic photos of themselves in skimpy outfits that you would never let them leave the house in. Be sure you monitor the photos that your children are posting on MySpace. If your children know that you will see the photos, then they are less likely to post something sexual.

The Friends List
The friends list on MySpace consists of the people who your child is in some way "connected" with. They might be friends with the person from school or a club they are involved in. Or, they may have met through MySpace, when browsing through the various profiles. It's not unusual for MySpace users to have an excess of 300 "friends". Many of whom they do not know in person.

"Friends" are able to see the bulletins your children post. Bulletins are short messages that a user can post that are only visible to his/her friends. These bulletins can be about anything, and range from random surveys to what that user is doing in the evening. If one of your child's "friends" is really an Internet predator and your child posts a bulletin about going to a particular party or even just soccer practice, the predator could easily find out where your child will be and when. It's important that your child trust the people on his/her friends list, and that he/she doesn't post bulletins that give such specific details. The challenge is that having a large number of friends on MySpace ostensibly makes you "cool", so teens will try to accumulate as many friends as possible, regardless of whether or not they trust or even know who that person is.

You may have heard references to the "Top 8". The Top 8 friends (actually now MySpace has made it possible for users to have a Top 8, 12, 16, etc.) are those friends who are listed on the user's profile as their "Top 8". The implication is that these people are your child's closest friends. Believe it or not, these lists can cause arguments among friends, if someone is not listed in someone else's Top 8, they could be hurt or offended.

Comments
Anyone on a user's friends list can leave them comments. A comment is a short blurb, an image, or even a video that is left on the user's profile page by a friend. Your child has the option of approving these comments before they are posted so that his/her friends don't post anything inappropriate. The danger with comments is that many teens use the comments section as they would e-mail. They might leave a comment that says "see you tonight at the football game". While seemingly innocent, this comment is visible to everyone, and everyone who has access to your child's profile will know exactly where he/she is going that night. Additionally, some comments tend to be sexual in nature, such as erotic photos or other images.

Privacy Options
If your child has a MySpace profile, you should suggest, or even insist, that it be made private. A private profile is only visible to the people on a user's friends list. Other people who visit the profile URL would simply see their name, age and a single photo. Although your child might not know everyone on his/her friends list in person, at least there is some knowledge of who the profile is visible to.

Now that you know the basics of MySpace, you can have an informed conversation with your kids about how they are using it, and help them protect themselves from Internet predators.