| | So I was browsing Xanga today and came to the conclusion that, in spite
of my unfettered access to the Internet growing up, some parents should
keep a closer eye on what their kids put online. For instance, I was
required to use a pseudonymn for my online activities, which I
continued to do until I was 17. However, it seems this isn't popular on
Xanga, with blogs from kids as young as 7 (!) -- kids who've listed
their metro, their age, their name, and where they go to school. It's a
pedophile's dream -- a ready made collection of personal information,
including insight into a kid's habits from reading their journals.
I have some ideas on how to correct this, but for the kids here, the
cat's already out of the bag -- these 2k (or so) youngsters in the
Johnson City area already have revealed their information; it's the
same for virtually any metro. Requiring a connection -- while anyone
can establish a blog, to view it you have to be invited or know a
friend of the person -- would go a significant distance towards cutting
down the access to the information. This would have to be applied as a
default, and retroactively, site-wide. Otherwise, I could just befriend
one of your friends, and traverse the network in an automated fashion
from there.
Social networking sites, like The Facebook, ConnectU, Friendster, etc,
seem to have already gotten this right. Why can't a similar solution be
retrofitted onto Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. to protect the
privacy of those members of society who are really too young to be
aware of the dangers they face?
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| | Posted 6/18/2005 8:06 PM - 27 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
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