Buckle In For Safety On The Web

Larry Magid's Tips For Parents, Kids On Privacy & Safety Online

(CBS)  Over the last several months, MySpace has been pummeled in the media and criticized by elected officials and law enforcement for maintaining a social networking web site that makes it far too easy for predators to find young victims

Recently, the site has been taking steps to enhance user safety but there are also things that users and parents can do to protect privacy and enhance online safety.

Privacy Features

The best way to protect your privacy on MySpace or any other service is to avoid posting any personally identifiable information.

MySpace does have some privacy features that vary depending on the stated age of the user. Users under age 16 can make their profile private, which means that the full profile can only be seen by "friends" who they approve. Another option is to specify that the profile be made available only to MySpace members under 18, but there is no way to know for sure the real age of any member.

Having a private profile doesn't make you invisible. Users can still search for children under age 16 by name or e-mail address and see their picture, a headline on their site, their gender, their sexual orientation, age, location, when they were last on and when they last updated their profile.

The option of making a profile private, meanwhile, is only for users under 16. Older members can't do that. All users are asked to state their date of birth when they join and that can be changed at any time by logging in, going to your home page, clicking Edit Profile, going to the Basic Info tab and clicking Edit.

Still, there are some optional privacy features available to older users. For example, all users have the option of requiring a last name or e-mail address to get requests to be added as a friend (that makes it harder for strangers to pester you with unwanted messages).

You can also require that you approve other people's comments before they're posted to the page, so someone can't add a comment without your permission. You can choose to hide, rather than announce, the fact that you're online. Unless you select the "hide" option, anyone can know when you're at the computer.

Other privacy options include preventing others from forwarding links to pictures on your site and controlling who can comment on your blog or who can see certain postings on your blog. In MySpace, a blog is an area accessible from your profile (main page) where you can engage in a discussion with other members.

Privacy settings are set by signing into MySpace, going to your home page, clicking Account Settings and then the "change settings" link next to Privacy Settings.

You can stop specific users from posting a message or communicating with you but there is no way to block specific users from viewing your profile or searching for your profile in the search engine. You can, however, edit your profile to change or remove information that you don't want to share with the public.

A user can request that his or her account be cancelled by clicking "cancel account" from the Account Settings menu, but if parents wish to cancel their child's account, the help system tells them to "work with your child to remove the account." You must be logged in as your child, so if you don't know your child's username and password, you can't get in.