Virtue Magazine

MySpace lets you share photos, journals, and interests with your growing network of mutual friends. See who knows who, or how you are connected. Find out if you really are six people away from Kevin Bacon. (1)

MySpace is for everyone: friends, singles, matchmakers, families, co-workers, classmates…you name it, and MySpace is for you. But is MySpace as great as the folks there would like you to think?

The process for setting up YourSpace is very simple. All that it requires is your name (first and last—we’re dashing the former unspoken rule of never giving out your last name on the rocks), your email address, your date of birth, your country, your postal code (makes giving out your last name seem like a piece of cake), gender and a password. Not to mention a verification code to ensure you’re not a bot. The next step is none other than putting up a picture of yourself.

To make this MySpace really YourSpace, you can pick your MySpace url (http://www.myspace.com/whatyouchoose), and your display name. They promise never to reveal your real name unless someone is searching for you. Of course, then it’s alright.

Then it’s time to take YourSpace and make it OurSpace. “Tom”, the creator of MySpace, is already on your friends list. But you can add who you want and create your own personal web of friends, sharing journals and photos and memories.

MySpace certainly seems fun and a portal to the world. But is it necessarily the safest thing to have the world at your fingertips? As Bilbo Baggins told Frodo, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” (2)

Certainly MySpace has had its fair share of publicity, whether it was concerning pedophiles attempting to get under-age boys and girls to have sex or the recent event of a 16-year-old Michigan girl going to meet a man in Jericho without her parents’ knowledge, only to be stopped by the FBI in Jordan.

Recently, however, MySpace has begun to take some more steps toward increasing the security of their site. In April they hired Hemanshu Nigam as their chief security officer. (3) Nigam is a former porn prosecutor of the Justice Department and is an advisor on cyberstalking to the White House.

Under Nigam, numerous security measures have been begun to be put up in addition to the ones that are already there. People under 14 are not allowed to join (but how they are sure the years of birth aren’t being lied about is another question) and those under 16 have protection to prevent their personal information from being viewed by people they don’t know. MySpace reviews every image posted to a profile, provides a filtering software for parents, and limits access to various groups depending on content.

Does this mean that MySpace won’t ever have any problems again with sexual predators or cyber bullies or the like? Not necessarily. Does it mean that it is not one bit safer than it was before these precautions were in place? Not necessarily. Will teens still think that it’s MySpace and not TheirSpace if their parents come with concerns? Probably. But what matters most is that some things are changing, and hopefully for the better.

Regardless of the changes, MySpace still presents a problem, especially in light of the girl from Michigan. (4) Propositioning those who are underage for sex is illegal, and constitutes a crime. Surely something like this is not as safe as some people wish to claim.

But that begs the question. Is it just as bad, and is something like Friendster better or worse?

Part 1 of 2

Sources:

1. http://collect.myspace.com/misc/about.html
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
3. http://www.smdp.com/article/articles/1018/1/MySpace-recruits-security-leader
4. http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/14783810.htm