Apr 25, 2006

Secure My Space!

Is it possible to get into the Space of the present day teens/preteens and make sure that they are safe & secure? I guess, 'possible' is no longer a question? The question is, how can we make their space a secured one. So, you got the idea of what I'm talking about?
Lately, MySpace is falling in the wrong side of the news for all reasons. The latest news today is, the site has been banned in a college. Well, after seeing the title my guess is like - for the protection of the college kids from pranks during the time, the kids are in campus. But the reasoning behind the ban is 'bandwidth' usage. My goodness, can you believe that the traffic to MySpace from the college, attributes to 40% of their network bandwidth. Hmm, no wonder MySpace has 72 million users and imagine the other traffic which keeps visiting without registration because of all these news makings. I haven't visited it yet but will do it once I start liking the news it makes.
So, this site has been pulling the teens, college kids, preteens & this has led to the pranksters posing as those kids. This is quite possible in any website like even yahoo users can be abusing its chat rooms & so on. Alright, without diverting much, lets just concentrate on MySpace and how it can regain the confidence of people. Lets think about how it can build some security measures to make sure the users who register are valid legitimate users.
1) Users below 14 shouldn't be allowed to register.
2) Photos posted should be scanned for decency.
3) Users below 18 can't (I mean the system should restrict) reveal their personal info. So, kids below 14 are going to pose as 18 year old and accordingly register or just move to other websites where they can register. How to verify? By making the address & phone numbers as required fields & verifying them for correctness. If its possible, IP address should also be recorded & verified. This will for sure reduce the number of misusers.
4) Educating more & more. Cautioning with more & more stories. Make the parents get more involved and teach them to watch their kids' internet traffic.
These few initial steps will carry the website a long way through, as a GOOD social website for kids & teens. Ain't it better to avoid bad news & pull more crowd?

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