How safe are your kids?
MySpace is the fastest growing internet community online. Forget MySpace. Between MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Friendster and hi5, chances are that your kids have a profile on at least one of these networks.
With recent news of harassment on these sites, I’ve been thinking and researching various ways of enforcing online security and identity verification. I stumbled upon a lot of existing solutions that verify identity and age. Some sites have started implementing these solutions in order to protect their community. Two popular ways of implementing security are described in brief below:
- Age Verification Software and Services - Companies like Veratad and Integrity offer verification services that ask a variety of personal questions to the user and verify the answers against national information databases. In other cases, an ID or credit card is used to do the same thing as well.
- Integrated site security - Sites like MySpace have integrated some level of security within their application. Things like preventing adult users from adding underage ones to their network, etc.
If you think about it, both methods are seriously flawed. How easy is it to get your hands on a credit card or your dad’s driver’s license? How easy is it for adults to verify their identity and then pawn off “verified” identities within social networks? And just simply, how easy is it to just lie about your age? At any given time, it is very hard to determine who is sitting on the other side of the screen, an adult or a minor. And I think it is this fundamental fact that prevents these solutions from being effective.
With parents suing these networks, the pressure is mounting to come up with a foolproof solution. Unless a solution is created that tackles real-time verification, we’re surfing under a false sense of security. Real-time, how? How about finger print verification? A lot of laptops already come equipped with fingerprint readers. This may or may not be feasible for every user and that is why I want to focus on the more obvious solution to this problem. You.
Shouldn’t the ultimate responsibility lie with the parents? If a child gets abducted or hurt while playing at a park, we don’t sue the city, do we? Technology is supposed to simplify our life, not run it. And it is quite ridiculous for parents to think that MySpace might be able to step in and help raise their kids for them.
With great power, comes great responsibility. There are literally millions of guides online that provide assistance and pointers to protect your kids online.
So to really answer the question, “How safe are your kids?”…..You tell me.
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