Catfish and Naive Social Network Behavior

Saw the movie "Catfish" last night which is purportedly based on true events. That controversy aside, it was interesting to see supposed sophisticated social network participants experience 'eye-opening' events.

It reinforces that even the most experienced social networkers are capable of being fooled. If people like this are fooled, what chance do our young teens stand on the networks?

Founder on Fox News

Kevin Long, the YouDiligence founder, made an appearance on Fox News today. Fox News was following up on another story done by the Daily Missourian regarding our work with the University of Missouri Tigers football team.

A lot of the points Kevin makes in the Fox segment about how we help student athletes applies to our work helping parents with kids active on social networks. Check out the news segment here:

Inspiration from Madeleine and Anna Quindlan

One never knows where inspiration is going to come from. I got some from an unusual source the other night: an essay on the Madeleine children book series, "Mad about Madeleine", written by Anna Quindlen (which I have not been able to find published on the web in a cursory search).

But toward the end of the essay, Ms. Quindlen writes the line, "Children prize both security and adventure, both bad behavior and conformity, both connections and independence." To me, this is a perfect encapsulation of childhood, and especially the journey through the tweens and teenage years toward adulthood and independence.

From the outside, I am sure I was perceived as adventuresome, independent, non-conformist and a bit of a troublemaker. But this is not the real story. The real story involved a real daily tension between all the opposites listed in Ms.Quindlen's lines. I had a real pull toward security, conformity and connections on a daily basis, and I am sure my journey was more the rule than the exception.

This idea mirrors the concept of all of us having a nature half monster and half angel. And this nature is why YouDiligence is important for parents. Even the best behaved kids will have episodes where they are pulled off their good behavior axis. In other words, good kids have a daily struggle being good--it is hard to be good all the time.

The YouDiligence platform recognizes this daily struggle. YouDiligence platform also recognizes that independence is very important to all kids. We designed YouDiligence explicitly to respect this fact, and to try to create a platform that could simultaneously respect kids' privacy and give parents the peace of mind in knowing that their kids have a safety net for those times when the kids are not behaving as appropriately or safely as parents would hope,

FCC Chair Genachowski on Youth & Surge in Media Consumption

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said some interesting things at the recent Kaiser Family
Foundation event exploring media usage by young people.

The chairman, who worked to implement the Children's Television Act as a top FCC staffer in the 1990s, said the release of the study underscores the FCC's effort to update that act for the digital age--it launched an inquiry in October. "When I think about the challenges, I think about more screens, more time in front of screens, and more dangers from both."

He said the changes in technology and the media marketplace can "inform changes in policy going forward, so that we have, at the end, an ecosystem of policy, technology and economics that really serves kids and honors the First Amendment at the same time."

Balancing these factors will be the crux of the matter moving forward, and it is incumbent upon all technology developers and providers, especially in the internet safety field, to pay special attention to this balancing act.

Elementary School Kids Using Facebook

A Tennessee elementary principal is warning parents that many children in his school are using Facebook, seemingly to attract a boyfriend or girlfriend. While this is not shocking, it should put internet safety for their kids as paramount in parents' minds.

http://ydurl.com/p6xw

Parents understand most children are still learning how to interact socially at that age, but yet the 20-30 hours a week the kids spend on social networking sites are mostly unsupervised. This is a recipe for trouble or worse. Internet predators prey on these unsuspecting and impressionable youngsters looking for attention. Cyber-bullies use social networks to threaten and scare them.

Parents need to protect their children from these unfortunate realities, and YouDiligence (www.youdiligence.com) can help.

Boston Girl, 12, Duped by MySpace Predator into Thinking She was going to Hollywood to be a Movie Star

Chaulk one up for the MA State Police who were able to save a Boston girl, 12, who was lured to purchase a ticket to fly to Hollywood to become a movie star by someone posing as a 16 year old girl on MySpace.

http://ydurl.com/nr9p

Anyone who thinks that MySpace and Facebook are safe from creeps who prey on children needs to wake up. Parents need to protect their children and teach them about internet safety and using socal networks responsibly.

This story could have ended much worse. I am relieved for this girl and her parents that she is safe at home tonight.

YouDiligence helps parents protect their children from online predators and cyber-bullies.

BSOT = Be Safe Online Tonight

Another Cyberbullying Story

I try to make it a habit of presenting YouDiligence to at least one school or church organization every week. Last week, I spoke to the PTO of Fairfield (outside of St. Albans). It seems like at every one of these presentations, I hear a cyberbullying story. In fact, one of my primary tasks at all of these meetings is to just listen. Kids' online activity raises a lot of uncertainty for parents.

It is hard enough dealing with uncertainty for just oneself. When one's kids are involved, worrying over uncertainty goes to a whole other level.

At the meeting, a woman said she had really wished that she had known about YouDiligence two months ago, and she related the story of how her daughter was recently cyberbullied. Her story had all the classic aspects of cyberbullying that I have heard repeatedly in different forms and shapes. The mother noticed that her daughter had been moody and uncommunicative for weeks and weeks, and knew something was up, but the daughter did not want to share. Finally, the cyber bullying episode reached a point where the daughter broke down, and realized she could not control the situation. This is when the mother got involved. The mother did not share the exact specifics, but she felt that much pain and suffering would have been spared if she could have stepped into the situation much earlier.

And that is a very important point. Kids in their tweens and early teens are struggling with issues of control and mastery. And parents want to encourage this mastery--we are proud of our kids' mastering skills and knowledge growth. But the truth of the matter is that young kids should 'be spotted', and in fact, they want to know that their parents are doing so. The tricky part of adolescence for both kids and parents is navigating this path from very dependent (under 10 years old, and wanting to be spotted) to ostensibly independent (hopefully by 18-19, and resentful if parents are still trying to spot them).

When considering kids' online activities in terms of this navigation path, it is entirely understandable why internet safety has become the number one concern for parents.

Posting On Social Networking Sites Creates a Permanent Record

Remember when you were in junior high and the principal used to scare you into believing that if you didn't behave that it would go down on some all powerful "permanent record"? Well now that permanent record actually exists -- and worse, it's a public forumn. Internet safety is something all parents should teach their kids from the very beginning of internet use.

Social Networking can be a great tool and a harmless way to interact with friends. But there are dangers, not the least of which is that everything you post, is now there for posterity as this article highlights.

http://ydurl.com/ggvs

Whether it's MySpace, Facebook, or any other site, if you post it, someone can find it, access it, and expose it.

YouDiligence (www.youdiligence.com) helps protect kids futures, hopefully keeping their "permanent record" as clean as possible in the internet era.

2,116 Convicted North Carolina Sexual Predators had MySpace Accounts

Parents in North Carolina can rest a little easier as their attorney general struck a blow for internet safety by identifying 2,116 sexual predators in NC that had MySpace accounts -- and MySpace shut them down.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/10/nc.sex.offenders/index.html

In the last month there have been almost 100,000 sexual predators' accounts shut down on MySpace and Facebook combined. But that's out of nearly 400 million accounts -- uh, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this represents a very incomplete accounting for the likely actual number of predators on those sites. These were just the predators dumb enough to use their real names -- and finally someone decided to run a check comparing the MySpace and Facebook roster against the convicted sexual predator database. It's not just the names that need to be checked. It couldn't be more clear, for the safety of their kids, parents need to consider monitoring their kids' pages.

Studies show kids spend over 30 hours per week online, mostly unsupervised. How likely is it that they come into contact with a predator or are bullied by their peers? That's a question parents must ask themselves.

Fortunately parents now have help. YouDiligence (http://www.youdiligence.com)/sends email alerts to parents when questionable material is posted on their kids' sites -- providing some peace of mind.

5600 -- Really? Facebook Only Identifies 5600 Sexual Predators' Accounts

The sincerity of social networking sites regarding Internet safety can be questioned after the latest news from Facebook. See this TechDirt post:

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090220/1017023844.shtml#comments

During a week of taking a public relations beating and a subsequent user rebellion over claiming perpetual ownership rights to the content posted by its users, Facebook followed MySpace's lead to identify and remove known, convicted sexual predators from its site. What's curious is that out of Facebook's 100+ million subscribers only 5600 were registered sexual predators. By contrast, MySpace found over 90,000 -- this also seems really low when compared to their number of subscribers, which they put at 200+ million.

5600 -- Really? That's about as believable as Alex Rodriguez's partial-kind-of-not-so-much-yeah-I-was-young-and-dumb (hey it worked for Michael Phelps) explanation of his steroid use. One has to ask several questions:

• How hard did Facebook really look?


• How committed is Facebook to Internet safety?


• Is Facebook really concerned about the safety of their users?

We should probably commend the social networks for however reluctantly beginning to take small steps towards making their product safer. However it clearly further identifies the need for parents to protect their kids online.

YouDiligence (www.youdiligence.com) helps parents with this daunting task. YouDiligence doesn't rely on the honesty of sexual deviants to identify themselves. It works even if false identities are being used. YouDiligence scans the content itself of what is posted on kids pages, helping parents identify suspicious and troubling posts. Parents have the control to customize the search criteria that's used to alert them to troubling posts by their children and others on their children's sites. Once an issue is identified, YouDiligence emails the parent an alert in real-time.

BSOT = Be Safe Online Tonight

Peers are a larger group than Predators

A good article appeared in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Biggest online threat is peers, not predators . It is a balanced view of the ongoing debate between internet safety experts. Some experts are focused on the dangers posed by predators, and some are focused on cyber-bullying and child development issues. The following quote is something that we stress all the time here at YouDiligence:

Morris-Reichenbach says parents need to step in to closely monitor their children’s online activities and help their children make good decisions in cyberspace.

“Parents need to tell their kids: ‘You send something, you post something to a friend, and you have to live with it being out in cyberspace forever. If you have any doubt, don’t do it,’ ” she said.

Parents Should be Concerned about Internet Safety for Kids

This item from Indiana today where police arrested a 28 year old man who had repeatedly had sex with a 14 year old girl he met on MySpace.

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/18688318/detail.html

This news only reinforces the fact that sexual predators troll social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace looking for unsuspecting victims, especially children. It is a parents' right to protect their children from harm, and many parents need help to make the internet safer for their kids.

YouDiligence makes it easier for parents to know who their kids are interacting with online, and alerting them to risky internet activity on their children's social networking accounts.

Larry Magid, the Internet Safety Guru, Discusses State Attorneys' MySpace Report

Larry Magid who is connected to the organization ConnectSafely.Org has written an interesting response to the State Attorneys General report about MySpace kicking 90,000 sexual predators off their site. Check it out: Magid Article

One of Magid's comments that sticks out is:

"Online safety groups and public officials should be spending our time educating families on how to avoid real risks that affect most kids-- like bullying, harassment and unwanted exposure to inappropriate material."

He says we should focus on the above issues and points out:

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is one of several safety organizations that no longer condone the use of the phrase "stranger danger."

Facebook Impostors Raise Internet Safety Concerns

Here is another story about the dangers of social networking and Internet safety. People posing as someone else, and then getting the real person's friends to send money to the impostor. This is the ultimate cyber-bullying.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/05/facebook.impostors/index.html

At UDiligence, (YouDiligence's product for college athletic departments) we have run into this problem when protecting the online reputations of student-athletes. We have found a number of "poser" pages that were put up in malice, intending to damage the reputations of the athletes.

Two of the instances involved female soccer players, who had MySpace pages that they didn't create, but that said very graphic and sexually explicit things about them. UDiligence notified the school and helped get the pages taken down, saving the long term reputation issues for the athletes, who were graduating and looking for jobs.

BSOT = Be Safe Online Tonight

A group of State Attorney General's offices release MySpace Sex Offender Report: Are they moving to Facebook?

A group of State Attorney General's offices released a report the other day stating MySpace had purged 90,000 accounts of people who are in the sex offender database.

http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?A=3673&Q=433228

It is good that MySpace is tring to be proactive in this regard. Tech Crunch has a blogger, Erick Schonfeld, that has been covering this topic for the last month. He wrote a very interesting post that suggests many of these booted MySpace predators might have migrated to Facebook.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/03/thousands-of-myspace-sex-offender-refugees-found-on-facebook/

This makes perfect sense for the predators. What predators want is a large population, because there is a larger pool of potential victims to choose from and it is easier to not stand out when there is a crowd. When we started YouDiligence, we recognized that MySpace and Facebook were the two dominant players in the social networking space, and that our service would be most beneficial on these two sites.

Wisconsin Sexual Predator on Facebook

The day after MySpace announced that they had removed more than 90,000 sexual predators with accounts from trolling their social network, this story appears out of Wisconsin. An 18 year old male faked being a girl and then solicited and blackmailed teenage boys into having sex with him by claiming he would expose nude photos of them if they didn't comply.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihOT1uPILQwicwpDuJO4bLWFdnRAD965CPNO0
If ever there was a case that shows how YouDiligence could have helped parents protect children, this is it. YouDiligence searches kids pages for words that predators and cyber-bullies use, and alerts parents by email when it finds a match on their kids' MySpace or Facebook pages.

BSOT = Be Safe Online Tonight

Attorneys General, Social Networking Companies and Internet Predators

New study challenges attorneys general on predator danger and the link below describes the debate on this issue:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10151959-238.html

This debate will continue, but what is necessary no matter the danger, is that parents have technologies to counter the risks and realities that may come with social networking.

It may seem simplistic but parents would not allow their 10 year olds to spend hours at the park unsupervised with no knowledge of the scope and nature of their activities. Yet who can expect a parent to want to -- or have the time to -- read through all the content, posts and links of a kid's social networking site?

We created YouDiligence to bridge the gap, raise awareness and help parents and kids have collaborative discussions about the boundaries of on line social networking.

Cyber Bullying Heats Up.

The topic of cyber bullying is heating up. There are 10 or so stories a day being reported. There is still quite a debate on how to prevent this for parents and teens. There's an even greater debate on how to respond when it happens to you or your children. One of the largest discussions on this topic is centered around the legal aspects of this type of attack. This is new territory for all involved. Cyber bullying is a whole new breed of ridicule that isn't always as visible as the type on the playground. 

As the law and ways to respond to and prevent cyber bullying become more clear, we'll continue to follow and report developments as well as our suggestions.

Here's one of the several stories that came out today on this topic. It includes several tips on dealing with cyber bullying. Early detection is one of the best ways to stop this before it's a serious problem for anyone.

"Protect kids with these online tips"

PTO and PTA Roles in Internet Safety

I am scheduled to speak to a local PTO organization next saturday night. PTOs are similar to PTAs--it is just that they are not officially recognized by the national or state PTA organization. PTOs tend to be organized for elementary and middle schools.

I think it is great that parents and their respective PTOs are taking proactive measures at the elementary and middle school level. It shows they are aware that internet safety needs to be addressed at as early an age as possible. As soon as a kid gets online, both they and their parents should be getting into good habits around safe and responsible online activities.

It is good that schools, through their PTOs, are sharing the responsibility to generate safe online experiences.

Silver Lining of Dr. Megan Moreno's Study

Dr. Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, is one of the authors of a just released study (appearing in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine) that looked at potentially risky behavior on MySpace by self-described 18 year old males and females. The gaudy headlines in a lot of the major media verged on the tabloid-esque with such headlines as "Study: 54 percent of MySpace profiles of 18-year-olds mentioned risky behaviors": See CNN's Take on Study

For sure, there were some troubling aspects of the study, and it suggested we have a ways to go in raising internet safety issues, especially concerning our children, but there were positive 'notes' in the study.

For example, the study recommends that parents not be fearful of, but instead engaged with, their kids' online lives. Certain articles on the study quoted experts that recommended exactly what we at YouDiligence recommend--for kids living under your roof, have their login and password. As we like to say about the YouDiligence platform, this does not necessarily result in a loss of their privacy. If kids act appropriately on their sites, then YouDiligence will not generate reports, and you, as a parent, can sleep comfortable knowing they are acting responsibly. The other benefit of YouDiligence (used in tandem with having your kids' login and password) is that you will receive an email alert almost immediately if your child changes his/her password.