MySpace is being sued in the wake of a sexual assault.
MySpace’s age verification practices come under attack by the plaintiff’s attorneys. The site requires users to be at least 14 years old, asking for name, date of birth, e-mail address, sex, and country of residence. However, it does not attempt to verify the information, which is the basis for the lawsuit.
In a statement, MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said that the site takes “aggressive measures” to protect its members and encouraged all Internet users to use “smart web practices” and “have open family dialogue on how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”
While I sympathize with the fourteen-year-old and her family–because, my God–I’m not entirely sure that there is a better approach than the one MySpace is advocating.
MySpace has come under increased scrutiny lately. Federal legislation was recently introduced that would regulate access to that and other, similar sites from public computers in libraries and schools. Sponsor Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has called social networking sites aimed at younger users a “feeding ground for child predators,” and it’s all but certain that this case will provide more ammunition for similar criticism of the site and strengthen calls for regulating access to it by children.
As the friend who sent me the link put it, is there any way to regulate access by sexual predators instead?
And is a sixteen-year-old that much less likely to mistake predation than a fourteen-year-old, or less deserving of protection?
I am leery of this for a few reasons. First of all, subcultures need the internets. If I had been unable to go online for information and support, I would have been deprived of a vital resource. Second, subcultures tend to be under much heavier scrutiny, and tend to face disparate-impact dangers from legislative and policy definitions of obscenity, sexuality, and explicit content. Third, some of the protective information and support resources available to young women must be explicit in order to be useful. A teenager seeking candid advice about unplanned pregnancy or sexual abuse could likely have her network choked off by measures established to protect her. Look at the way wingnuts talk about Planned Parenthood.
From a follow-up link (sent by the same friend), it looks as though MySpace is working to make it more difficult for predators to operate. I wish it hadn’t taken three (reported) assaults and a lawsuit to prod them into action. It’s not as though the spectre of sexual assault facilitated by the internet is a new development:
The site will also stop showing advertisements for certain products–like online dating sites–to those under 18.
(snip)
Next week, the site will restrict how users older than 18 can contact those aged 14 and 15. Older users sending a message asking to become friends with younger users will have to enter the recipients’ actual first and last names or their e-mail addresses, rather than simply their user names.
(snip)
MySpace will also start to allow all members to designate their profiles as private and thus available only to their named list of friends. MySpace had allowed and encouraged those under 16 to set their profiles to be private, but profiles of anyone older than that have been available for any visitor to the site to read.
It doesn’t look like they’re doing much about verification, though:
Parry Aftab, the executive director of WiredSafety, a group that promotes online privacy for young people, dismissed the change in the contact rules for those under 16 as ineffectual.
“Kids that want to do the open stuff will set their ages to 16,” she said. MySpace does not verify users’ ages.