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Consumer Security Kids, blogs and too much information Children reveal more online than parents know By Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent MSNBC Updated: 11:42 am ET April 29, 2005 Marcy's 13-year-old daughter has a knack for switching computer screens o r shutting the laptop when mom walks in the room. Like in many families , the two often argue about whether mom has the right to see what her da ughter is doing online.
Click Here But a few months ago, Marcy's need to keep up with her daughter's Interne t travels took on a new urgency when she found an unfinished message on the screen urging a friend to check out her daughter's picture on a spec ial Web page her daughter had set up. With that, Marcy made a discovery thousands of parents around the country are making -- teenagers are among the most active Internet bloggers, an d many are posting pictures, names, addresses, schools, even phone numbe rs, almost always without their parent's knowledge. "It blew me away," said Marcy, who requested her full name not be used. I sat my daughter down and said, 'Do you realize ho w inappropriate and how dangerous this is?
When she did, she found her daughter's page, personal informa tion, and pictures. But she also found a list of her daughter's friends, and made another discovery -- almost all of her 8th-grade classmates at George Washington Middle School in suburban Ridgewood, NJ had pages o n MySpace. "There's shots wit h their butt in the air, with their thongs sticking out of it. They sque eze their elbows together to make their boobs look bigger."
Handy discovered that about one-third of her 250 students have Inter net blogs -- and only about 5 percent of the parents know about it. "You think your kid is safe because they are i n your house in their own bedroom. Who can hurt them when you are guardi ng the front door? But (the Internet) is a bigger opening than the front door."
MSNBC Blogs and their technology cousins, social networking sites, are all the rage among young Internet users. But it's what's on the sites that concerns Handy and other experts. A stu dy of teenagers' blogs published this year by the Children's Digital Med ia Center at Georgetown University revealed that kids volunteer far too much information. Two-thirds provide their age and at least their first name; really cognizant that the whol e world can read their blog?" said David Huffaker, who authored the stud y Experts interviewed for this article could not cite a single case of a ch ild predator hunting for and finding a child through a blog. But there a re cases of children being lured through other Internet services, such a s chat rooms. "I don't see why pedophiles wouldn't use this tool, if this is where kids are," said Ann Coulier of Net Family News. Great source of friends Blogs and community sites are a great source of entertainment and network ing for teenagers. High school junior Mary Ellen Handy -- Mary Lou's dau ghter -- said most of her friends began blogging when they were freshman . I go to an all girls' school, and it's a g reat way to meet guys from other schools," Mary Lou, who opened her MySp ace account at 15, said. While she's attuned to safety issues, "the sad thing is a lot of girls put their addresses, other personal information. So many people don't know what's going on how vulnerable they can be." Because they need a user name and password to join services like MySpace, experts say that many teenage users assume the site is protected. "But then they put their school name in, or their school team name," said. "They don't realize somebody could put two and two together and figure out who they are."
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