Hardware Geeks

Social Networking Websites are so much trouble now a days, especially if you have kids. Being a parent of two kids and the aunt to a few nieces and nephews I know how important it is to have an eye on what they are doing.

My teenage neices and nephews have MySpace pages which is ok, but recently I have started to notice is; a lot of men and women ages 20 – 45 want to be their friends for some reason. Maybe because they are pedophiles.

Because of these bad apples on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, a lot of people including myself block these social networking websites on their home network, and with free services such as OpenDNS making it so easy to do even the most novice of computer users are doing it themselves.

While Social Networking is great way to keep in touch with friends and family, our children who have access to these sites are at risk and it’s our duty as parents to protect them. What is mind boggling is Schools are doing very little to do the same. With the exception of schools in Virginia. My nephew is 10 years old, and he has a MySpace page, yet he doesn’t have a computer and he lied about his age to open the account.

How did he get it? Well his teacher at school helped him create one, and according to him and one of his classmates the teacher helped everyone in the class to create one. The teacher and all their classmates were listed as friends. While I can understand the benefit of this, the teacher whose profile was available to them had friends who also had public profiles, and these friends had somewhat “REVEALING” pictures of themselves in clothing that would make Ashley Dupree look like an Angel. This really bothered me and I went to my nephew’s school and raised hell.

I didn’t want the teacher to get in trouble since she was 22 or 23 and people make mistakes but I did want her removed from my nephews friends list and a note was sent home to parents about the MySpace page being created.

While some parents did not have an issue with this, I personally did and many others did as well, as no 10 year old should have a MySpace page, especially one that gives them easy access to WebPages of half naked women.

In writing this I also have learned that Social Networks are some of the most blocked websites on the internet. What is also surprising to me, is they are some of the most blocked sites on home networks, not just work and school networks.

Again while Social Networks are great, to keep in touch with friends and relatives, in my opinion MySpace is nothing more than a Dating site and no place for kids. We adults ruined it or was it Rupert Murdoch when he bought it.

Post Tags: security  myspace  opendns  social networking  children  facebook 

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