(CBS) More than a dozen years ago I wrote a booklet for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children called Child Safety on the Information Highway. Millions of copies are in print and countless people have seen it online. The first item in the child safety rules was “I will not give out personal information such as my address, telephone number, parents’ work address/telephone number, or the name and location of my school without my parents’ permission.” But new research suggests that my Rule No.1 may have been an overstatement.

I still don’t think anyone should give out their home address or phone number in a public forum, but it’s also important to face the reality of how today’s youth are using social networks and consider new data that suggest that as far as sexual solicitation is concerned, there are greater risks than disclosing personal information.

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center
at the University of New Hampshire, said that a recent study conducted by his center “suggests the need for a somewhat different approach to Internet safety education.” The study, said Finkelhor, “finds that giving out personal information online (one of the key prevention strategies emphasized in safety education) does not really increase a youth’s risk for sexual solicitation.” The emphasis, instead, should be about “making a lot of online acquaintances and talking with them about sex.” The study appeared in the February issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

The data is consistent with other recent findings that have caused the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to no longer focus on “stranger danger” but rather the types of interactions that children are having with other people, including both strangers and acquaintances.

The often quoted study found that one in seven young people who use the Internet “reported an unwanted interpersonal victimization in one year’s time” yet 55 percent of the youth reported having posted personal information. Of those, 80 percent gave out their age or year of birth, 61 percent gave out their real last name, telephone number, school name or home address and 33 percent posted a picture. In other words, giving out personal information is common practice, despite what I and other Internet safety advocates have been saying for years.

The authors also looked at other forms of potentially risky or inappropriate behavior and found that one in three had someone in their buddy list they didn’t know in person. They also found that 9 percent had harassed or embarrassed others online and 28 percent had made rude or nasty comments to someone on the Internet. They found that 5 percent of the sample said they had engaged in “talking about sex with someone they met online.” Specifically, 2.2 percent of the sample had one such encounter, 2 percent had two and only 1 percent had talked about sex online with a stranger 3 or more times.

When the researchers estimated the association between these risky behaviors with Internet victimization, they discovered that that talking about sex with someone known only online three or more times was associated with a 3-fold increase in the likelihood of being a victim. On the other hand, neither posting nor sending personal information was significantly related to being a victim.

What’s more, there is also a connection between a youth’s rude behavior and his or her chances of becoming a victim. “Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization,” the study reports.

By Larry Magid
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