I’m sure by now you’ve seen the news that the co-founder of MySpace has been caught faking his age on his MySpace profile. Quite ironic given the age verification issues social networks are facing these days. But now seems as good a time as any to say that age and identity verification doesn’t […]
I commend Second Life on their decision to offer a voluntary verification policy for their members. They are the first big social network to take a step toward adopting this technology.
The way I understand it, if you are a member that has chosen not to be verified you won’t be allowed access […]
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Attorneys Generals of all 50 States have joined forces to pressure social networking sites to require greater parental controls and age verification tools so that minors can’t access the sites so easily.
Here’s what Blumenthal had to say:
“These sites say they want to cooperate, but they have resisted […]
Did you hear about the laptop thief in New Zealand who was caught after somebody identified him through a YouTube video? Apparently someone caught the crime on camera and created a video of it set to the Pink Panther’s theme music and uploaded it to YouTube. One of the 500,000 viewers recognized the thief and […]
PC World wrote a more in-depth article last week regarding the Facebook news I blogged about here. I was particularly pleased to see this from Chris Kelly in the article:
“It is better to have some sort of verification on the front end and various forms of behavioral verification on the back end,” Kelly said of […]
Another social networking site is starting to take some heat from law enforcement in its ability to keep sexual predators off its site. The New York Times reports that Facebook, which has positioned itself as the safe social-networking alternative because it takes greater lengths than other social networks to keep adults and under-age users […]
Amy Tiemann has a blog post on CNET titled Online Safety Needs to Go Beyond “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” The focus of the post is on an Internet Prevention Messages research study to explore the odds for online interpersonal victimization (i.e. unwanted sexual solicitation or harassment) of youth ages 10-17 published in the February […]
A sexual predator in Connecticut that used MySpace to meet his 12-15 year old female victims is going to jail for 20 years, according to this television news source. While this might not be the first incidence of a sexual predator linked to a social networking site being sentenced, it is the first I’ve […]
Search industry giant Google announced that it will implement age verification for its services in Korea to prevent kids from accessing adult-themed searches. 700 “adult” keywords will be included in this program so that anyone searching and wanting to access content on those keywords will be required to prove they are 19.
I wonder if […]
Eight state Attorneys General wrote a letter to MySpace demanding they turn over the names of the registered sex offenders using their site. I’m very interested to see if and how MySpace will respond, especially since the social network relies on the honesty policy for its membership. Since we all know the honesty […]
