Shielding kids from online sex predators
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News Sacramento Bureau
SACRAMENTO - If parents notice that an older MOSS or MOTOS is asking for their child's A/S/L for OLL, they'd better have a serious F2F with the kid ASAP.
Translation: Members of the same sex and members of opposite sex are using the Internet to seek out children's age, sex and location for online love, and parents should speak with their kids face-to-face right now to prevent them from becoming victims.
That was one of several urgent messages a handful of online safety experts gave during a three-hour Senate committee hearing Monday to inform the public how to keep children safe when using Internet sites such as MySpace.com.
A representative from the statewide Parent-Teacher Association urged parents to learn the latest keyboarding lingo in the modern world of teen acronyms. Several experts implored teenagers to keep personal information off their Web pages on popular social-networking sites, namely MySpace.com.
``We're under-estimating our youth a lot,'' Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Fremont, said after the hearing. ``We just have to keep one step ahead to keep them safe.''
The Senate Business Professions & Economic Development Committee is not attempting to legislate Internet use in California, Figueroa said, but the hearing comes after multiple reports that sexual predators nationwide are increasingly selecting their victims by viewing teens' personal pages -- where they regularly post pictures of themselves and other identifiable details such as the name of their school and even cell phone numbers.
About one in five Internet users ages 10 to 17 has received an unwanted sexual solicitation online, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics cited during the hearing. And 97 percent of the solicitors were strangers.
``The statistics are alarming,'' said Teri Schroeder, president and chief executive of i-Safe.org, a non-profit foundation that offers Internet safety curriculum to schools.
Larry Magid, a technology expert from Palo Alto and father of a teenage son, shared tips from a Web site he developed, www.blogsafety.com.
His advice for young bloggers: Be as anonymous as possible, so strangers cannot locate you; protect your information so only friends can visit your site; avoid in-person meetings with someone you met in a blog; think before posting photos; delete offensive feedback comments that other users leave on your site.
Software filters can help, Magid said, but only a ``relatively small percentage'' of parents use them -- in some cases because they lack the knowledge to install them.
Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, then asked at least 25 parents who were in attendance if they had installed filtering software on their home computers. Very few hands went up.
``The most important filter,'' Magid said, ``is not the one that runs in the computer but the one that runs in the child's head.'' He added: ``The key to all of this is education, is parenting.''
MySpace.com is one of several networking sites used by teenagers and young adults. Others mentioned in passing at the hearing were Xanga, Hi5, LiveJournal and Facebook. But MySpace.com has received intense scrutiny of late, in part because of a high-profile sting by Dateline NBC, which successfully used MySpace.com to lure and nab would-be predators.
A media representative from MySpace did not immediately respond to an e-mail request for comment Monday afternoon. The company has posted Internet safety tips on its site, reminding users to ``avoid posting anything that would make it easy for a stranger to find you.''
The hearing was attended by dozens of youths from Jack and Jill of America, an organization that teaches leadership skills to African-American teenagers.
A 14-year-old girl told senators how easy it was to create an account on MySpace, a company whose user agreement states that only those 14 and older can sign up, and regularly investigates whether children are misrepresenting their age.
In testimony that gripped the teenagers, a young San Francisco woman retold her online experience as a 15-year-old.
Katie Canton, now 19, said a 22-year-old man showered her with gifts and a pledge to marry her -- and she believed it. Her father, though, grew suspicious after speaking with a police officer friend.
Shortly before her online boyfriend was to fly to the Bay Area, her parents sat her down to play a computer game called ``Missing,'' which is made by a non-profit Internet safety firm, Web Wise Kids.
The players analyze chat room conversations to try to learn the location of a boy lured by a predator.
For Canton, part of the game was eerily similar.
She learned the man had been wanted by the FBI for a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. And Canton finally saw him -- in a courtroom; she testified against him in the girl's case, and helped lock him up for 20 years.
Mercury News Sacramento Bureau
SACRAMENTO - If parents notice that an older MOSS or MOTOS is asking for their child's A/S/L for OLL, they'd better have a serious F2F with the kid ASAP.
Translation: Members of the same sex and members of opposite sex are using the Internet to seek out children's age, sex and location for online love, and parents should speak with their kids face-to-face right now to prevent them from becoming victims.
That was one of several urgent messages a handful of online safety experts gave during a three-hour Senate committee hearing Monday to inform the public how to keep children safe when using Internet sites such as MySpace.com.
A representative from the statewide Parent-Teacher Association urged parents to learn the latest keyboarding lingo in the modern world of teen acronyms. Several experts implored teenagers to keep personal information off their Web pages on popular social-networking sites, namely MySpace.com.
``We're under-estimating our youth a lot,'' Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Fremont, said after the hearing. ``We just have to keep one step ahead to keep them safe.''
The Senate Business Professions & Economic Development Committee is not attempting to legislate Internet use in California, Figueroa said, but the hearing comes after multiple reports that sexual predators nationwide are increasingly selecting their victims by viewing teens' personal pages -- where they regularly post pictures of themselves and other identifiable details such as the name of their school and even cell phone numbers.
About one in five Internet users ages 10 to 17 has received an unwanted sexual solicitation online, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics cited during the hearing. And 97 percent of the solicitors were strangers.
``The statistics are alarming,'' said Teri Schroeder, president and chief executive of i-Safe.org, a non-profit foundation that offers Internet safety curriculum to schools.
Larry Magid, a technology expert from Palo Alto and father of a teenage son, shared tips from a Web site he developed, www.blogsafety.com.
His advice for young bloggers: Be as anonymous as possible, so strangers cannot locate you; protect your information so only friends can visit your site; avoid in-person meetings with someone you met in a blog; think before posting photos; delete offensive feedback comments that other users leave on your site.
Software filters can help, Magid said, but only a ``relatively small percentage'' of parents use them -- in some cases because they lack the knowledge to install them.
Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, then asked at least 25 parents who were in attendance if they had installed filtering software on their home computers. Very few hands went up.
``The most important filter,'' Magid said, ``is not the one that runs in the computer but the one that runs in the child's head.'' He added: ``The key to all of this is education, is parenting.''
MySpace.com is one of several networking sites used by teenagers and young adults. Others mentioned in passing at the hearing were Xanga, Hi5, LiveJournal and Facebook. But MySpace.com has received intense scrutiny of late, in part because of a high-profile sting by Dateline NBC, which successfully used MySpace.com to lure and nab would-be predators.
A media representative from MySpace did not immediately respond to an e-mail request for comment Monday afternoon. The company has posted Internet safety tips on its site, reminding users to ``avoid posting anything that would make it easy for a stranger to find you.''
The hearing was attended by dozens of youths from Jack and Jill of America, an organization that teaches leadership skills to African-American teenagers.
A 14-year-old girl told senators how easy it was to create an account on MySpace, a company whose user agreement states that only those 14 and older can sign up, and regularly investigates whether children are misrepresenting their age.
In testimony that gripped the teenagers, a young San Francisco woman retold her online experience as a 15-year-old.
Katie Canton, now 19, said a 22-year-old man showered her with gifts and a pledge to marry her -- and she believed it. Her father, though, grew suspicious after speaking with a police officer friend.
Shortly before her online boyfriend was to fly to the Bay Area, her parents sat her down to play a computer game called ``Missing,'' which is made by a non-profit Internet safety firm, Web Wise Kids.
The players analyze chat room conversations to try to learn the location of a boy lured by a predator.
For Canton, part of the game was eerily similar.
She learned the man had been wanted by the FBI for a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. And Canton finally saw him -- in a courtroom; she testified against him in the girl's case, and helped lock him up for 20 years.
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