Lets take a look at a website that has been in the news lately. You may have heard of myspace.com and other social-networking sites that let users post pictures and have a personal web page with information about themselves. I have taken a look at some of the personal web pages on myspace.com and most of them are NOT, let me say again, NOT suitable for kids of any age. This is an adult site with adult photos, video and text, and seriously adult chatrooms. Myspace.com has members posting untruths and indecent pictures of themselves, in violation of the myspace.com terms of service.

Kids are creating personal web pages on myspace.com and they think it is fun to pretend they are 18 years old or older. The problem is they are giving out too much information about themselves. Kids can be chatting to other people that say they want to meet them at their home or at the mall. But what if the other person is not who they say they are? So now kids are meeting people they don’t know without a parent knowing anything about it. These are called fake friends but behind every fake friend is a real person.

There are also cases of adults using these websites to find, meet, and stalk young people. Such cases are typically the result of the victim displaying personal information on their personal web page, unaware of the potential audience. Law enforcement is working to spread knowledge about this subject to help prevent unpleasant cases in the future.

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