WSJ.com - MySpace Moves to Give Parents More Information

January 17, 2007

QUESTION OF THE DAY


1
Vote: Who is more responsible for the safety of minors on sites like MySpace?2

MySpace Moves to Give
Parents More Information
Web Site Popular With Kids
Offers to Monitor Names, Ages;
Will It Repel Biggest Users?
By JULIA ANGWIN
January 17, 2007; Page B1

In a bid to appease government critics, News Corp.'s popular Web site MySpace.com is planning to offer free parental notification software -- a move that risks alienating its young users.

Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn't enable parents to read their child's e-mail or see the child's profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child's name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers.

WHO'S WATCHING?


• The News: MySpace is developing parental notification software that would show parents how their child is representing him or herself on the site.

• The Background: Following dozens of reports of teens being molested by people they met through MySpace, a coalition of attorney generals from 33 states are pressuring MySpace to make its site safer for teens.

• What's at Stake: MySpace is the most popular social networking Web site in the world, but its ability to attract advertisers has been hampered by concerns about safety.

The software, code-named "Zephyr," represents MySpace's latest attempt to pacify critics who claim that the site is unsafe for teens. Dozens of teens have been molested and some even murdered by people who first contacted them through MySpace, according to law-enforcement officials.

The stakes are high for News Corp., which bought MySpace in 2005 for $650 million, back when it had 17 million monthly unique visitors and very little revenue. Since then MySpace has rocketed to 60 million monthly users in the U.S., surpassed Yahoo as the No. 1 U.S. Web site in terms of page views, and is expected to generate nearly $500 million in revenues this year.

But a group of 33 state attorneys general led by Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal are investigating taking legal action against MySpace if it doesn't raise the age limit to join the site to 16 (from 14 currently) and begin verifying MySpace members' ages against public databases.

A lawsuit by the attorneys general could cost MySpace tens of millions of dollars in fees and generate reams of negative publicity, at a time when major advertisers are just overcoming their concerns about the site.

So far, MySpace has refused to take either of the steps demanded by the attorneys general. It defends its age limit of 14, arguing that it is better for high-schoolers to join with the special privacy controls designed for 14- and 15-year-old members than to lie about their age to join. "If you're 14 you'll try to get on our site anyway because your friends are going to be on it," says Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for Fox Interactive Media, the unit that oversees MySpace.

(MySpace users who list their ages as 14 and 15 are automatically given a private profile that can't be browsed by members who list their age as over 18. Users over 18 can't add 14 and 15 year olds as friends unless they know the teenagers' first and last name or e-mail address. MySpace members under 18 can't access "mature" groups and can block contact from adults they don't already know.)

MySpace says it hasn't yet found a solution for the attorney generals' request for age verification. "We've spoken to a number of companies and we have not yet found a firm or technology that can reliably verify the age of our members under 18," Mr. Nigam says.

Privately, News Corp. officials and others in the industry say that age verification is difficult to implement for kids under the age of 18, because they often lack a driver's license or other government-issued identification. It can be done with parental permission slips -- but it's not always easy to verify the relationship between a parent and a child, and MySpace could be legally liable for mistakes.


Zephyr would put the burden on parents to monitor whether their children are lying about their ages (a favorite gambit of some kids who like to assume other identities on social-networking sites.) Parents are also often concerned that children will provide too much real information that could make them easy prey for kidnappers or molesters. The idea is to "give parents a tool to force a discussion with their kid." Mr. Nigam says.

MySpace has to tread a delicate line to keep the spirit of its Web site intact, while continuing to add safety features. The company says it is confident that the software won't alienate teen users because it isn't reporting on the teens activities, only about the features that any MySpace user could see on a teens' MySpace profile. Mr. Nigam adds that many teens also have said they want greater protection on the site. "Our teens have told us that being safe on our site doesn't mean they are no longer cool," adds Mr. Nigam.

In the meantime, MySpace officials have been discussing Zephyr with others in the Internet industry, and facing much skepticism.

In December, MySpace demonstrated the program to the leading Internet companies, including Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, at a meeting at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington D.C.

The meeting was filled with tough questions, says Ernie Allen, president and chief executive of the center, who worries that parents won't use the software since only 50 percent of parents currently use Internet blocking or monitoring software.

MySpace demonstrated a system that works as follows. A parent can download the free software onto his or her home computers. The software will identify any user who logs onto MySpace from those computers and collect his or her user name, age, and hometown. That information will be stored on the hard drive and parents (actually, whoever has the administrative privileges on that computer) can access it using a password. That information is also publicly available to anyone who visits MySpace's Web site, but many parents have trouble locating their kids' profile pages because kids often don't use their real names.

The software will not monitor the MySpace user's movements or email, but it will "tag" the profile and report back to the parent if the user name, age or hometown have been changed. The software will collect this information about anyone who logs onto MySpace from the home computer, so it could collect information about a child's friends as well as the child.

One big issue at the meeting was whether MySpace's software would violate the privacy of users. Other social-networking sites have more restrictive privacy rules than MySpace -- not allowing anyone to see a user's age or location, for example.

Another concern was that the software could be used by people other than parents to monitor the MySpace usage on their computers.

Still another issue is whether it will be easy to opt out. MySpace says that people who log onto MySpace from a computer that has the software installed will be notified. But MySpace says it still hasn't been decided whether users will have a chance to quit MySpace before their profile is 'tagged' by the software.

Such concerns have led some companies to decline to join MySpace's efforts, including college-oriented social networking Web site Facebook, which had 19.1 million unique visitors in December, and the blogging site Xanga, which had 4.6 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore Media Metrix.

"Based on what we've been told, Xanga cannot participate because doing so would require Xanga to share private consumer data with any third party who downloaded the software in violation of our privacy policy," says Stephen Kline, chief safety officer of Xanga.

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly says that MySpace's approach is "inconsistent with our privacy architecture." Unlike MySpace profiles which can be viewed by anybody on the Web, Facebook only allows its profiles to be viewed by people the member has specified as friends, colleagues or schoolmates or associates through another network.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL haven't yet said whether they will sign onto the MySpace initiative, but people close to those companies caution that each has their own safety and security initiatives that are higher priority. Yahoo, for instance, provides parental controls for millions of subscribers to Internet services that use Yahoo's technology. "Giving parents the ability to block access to content is much more important than just reporting that their children have been seeing content," says Yahoo spokesman Jim Cullinan. "

So far, it looks unlikely that the new software will appease the attorneys general. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who co-chairs the group with Mr. Blumenthal, says MySpace's software "notifies the parent too late. At best it's after the child has offered his age. At worst, it's when he's already left to meet a child predator."

Larry Magid, author of MySpace Unraveled and a Web site BlogSafety.com, says MySpace's software seems like an important step. But, he cautions "there is no tool that will solve the problem of parents not taking an interest in what their kids are doing on the Internet."

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com3

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Trends for Online Marketing in '07

The amount of video content will increase astronomically.
Online Marketing will continue to grow as a neccessary budget line item in american businesses.
Blogs will continue to grow as a great way for people to communicate thoughts.
MySpace will continue to grow as a networking community for the world.

Just some thoughts for now, will be sure to add additional soon.

Zach