Peter Griffin: Social networking website under scrutiny

Online safety organisation Netsafe is holding its annual symposium in Wellington next week, and social networking websites such as myspace.com will no doubt be high on the agenda.

Myspace, which was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in a deal worth US$580 million ($972 million) and now boasts 85 million members, has been getting a lot of press lately - much of it negative.

Type "myspace.com" into the news section of Google's search engine, and some worrying headlines emerge: "Teens use myspace to set up robbery victim", "Man pleads guilty to using internet for sex with minor", "Cops search myspace page of slain girl".

A few months ago, the website was billed as the best new place to promote bands, organise community groups and clubs, and express yourself among friends. Now it is seen as a hunting ground for perverts and fraudsters.

The backlash has mainly been in the US.

A few weeks ago, US news networks were headlining the story of a 17-year-old girl who attempted to fly to Israel to marry a man she'd met on myspace. US officials intercepted her in Jordan and put her on a plane home without her passport.

The worm has certainly turned for myspace, which is now being branded as an unsafe place for its mainly young members to congregate. Myspace's smaller competitors are coming under closer scrutiny as well.

The US current affairs show Dateline has based its top-rated series To Catch A Predator on online sting operations, which aim to nab would-be offenders on social networking websites. The show's camera crew is ready and waiting when the man who has been lying about his age turns up in the park to meet the 14-year-old girl.

The pressure is on the internet industry in general to fight exploitation of children on the web.

While myspace restricts those under the age of 14 from joining the site and prevents those claiming to be over 18 from seeing the profiles or those under 17, the whole system falls down when people lie about their age when signing up. Phone numbers and surnames are filtered out so people can't inadvertently give away their private details, but that doesn't stop them from doing so in weblog postings.

There's nothing to stop a 35-year-old man posing online as a 14-year-old girl. He's unlikely to make any myspace buddies without posting a picture of "herself", but one of those can easily be found on the internet and edited to his needs.

Critics want the websites to add age verification to stop people misrepresenting themselves online but that would involve members handing over a credit card number, which many people are dubious about doing online. Also, kids can't own credit cards, so that method of verification is useless.

The sites are used globally so verifying age by social security number would be problematic, even if that information could be accessed by myspace. In essence, there are no other publicly available databases of information that could be used for age verification, so there's no easy way to keep young people safe on such websites.

Despite the terrible design of the personal pages at myspace, the bad grammar and cacophony of music used in some profiles, it is amazingly useful.

And really, what's the danger in people reading innocuous details about what you like or what music you listen to or what you got up to on the weekend?

The biggest problem is educating people about becoming too familiar with people they've only ever met online.

So are the safety problems just an American problem, beaten up with media hype and pushed along by an administration with a conservative agenda? There are, after all, only a few thousand New Zealanders registered on the big US-based social networking websites. But the dangers are just as relevant for us, Netsafe says.

Take the example of a New Zealand girl who befriended an Australian "girl" of the same age. The two shared personal information, including comparing security in their homes and alarm codes. When the New Zealand girl returned from a holiday she had told her friend about, her home had been burgled. The investigation found the alarm had been turned off with the correct code and the 12-year-old "friend" was a burglar living nearby.

It's a valid cautionary tale. Social networking sites will become more popular here and parents need to be aware of the safety issues.