Crackdown: MySpace under legislative threat

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 08 March 2007 20:09

Your IT - Home IT

Could US legislation force MySpace to use age verification and gain parental consent before allowing minors to gain access to the ultra popular yet potentially dangerous MySpace website?

An article from News Times Live has exposed a legislative threat to MySpace from Attorney General Richard Blumenthal “that would require age verification and parental consent before minors could post profiles on MySpace and other social networking sites”.
 
Blumenthal’s legislation would require all social networking websites, including MySpace, to “comply or face fines up to $5,000 per violation”.

Apparently a coalition of 44 attorneys generals from 44 US States are considering similar legislation, signaling that US authorities want to be seen to be doing something to prevent pedophiles and other undesirables preying on minors through online social networks. 

Blumenthal was quoted by News Times Live as saying that “These sites must verify ages and give parents the power to keep their children off these sites. Failing to verify age means that children are exposed to sexual predators who may be older men lying to seem younger. There is no excuse in technology or cost for refusing age verification”.

While this legislation can hardly guarantee that no child in the future will ever be harassed or molested again online, and while political meddling and legislation generally fails to do anything particularly useful besides making politicians feel good about themselves and allows them to self-justify the massive pay packets, there is a chance that Blumenthal’s legislation may go some way in forcing parents to actually take responsibility for their children’s online lives, just as they take responsibility for their offline lives.

As citizens, however, we need to ensure that such legislation meets its intended purpose, and does not evolve into something that removes our rights online. After all, no-one wants to live in a police state.

So, while Blumenthal seems to be on the right track here, as we applaud decisions that can help children and parents to understand the threat posed by life online, education is usually the better course of action than legislation.

But if it is legislation that we must have, we must keep an eye on its success, and ensure that the outcome is indeed of benefit to our children, and not something that slowly erodes our rights and places us under even more surveillance than we already have to suffer in the modern era.

For more actual real-world information on how to both understand the realities of the online world, how to talk to your children about it and how to protect them, please visit http://www.commonsense.com for lots of excellent information!