Is your local Public Library on MySpace?
By Online Security Authority on Jul 22, 2008 in MySpace, Teen Guidelines
Keeping our Children Safe do You Need Help? can you Use Ours?
In doing a little research on teens and MySpace, there is becoming an overwhelmingly high number of search engine results for public libraries who have decided to make MySpace pages to attract the teenagers. Depending on your personal view of MySpace and the like and your view of how your child is able to handle such situations online, this may be good or bad.
No matter what your thinking is on this subject, there can be both good and bad to this kind of idea. Lets list the good things: it has the possibility of putting more “good” influences in front of teens, it may spark their interest of books and reading, it pyschologically may help them to know that other adults are out there and may give them a sense that they should keep their actions more in line, and there are many other reasons this could be good.2SMRT4U.jpg
On the flip side I can think of many reasons that this would not be a good idea. If parents are banning MySpace from home, and then sending their children to the library (assuming there is no great risks while there) and not knowing that MySpace is allowed this would be very upsetting, do libraries do background checks for the personnel that work at the library? and because we are talking about an online community, are libraries putting children and teens at risk because of the friends that they may be associating with? How does the library control who is allowed to be their online friends?
There is no way to really be able to tell if a friend request that comes in is from a real teenager or a predator. Allowing this kind of behavior online and allowing possible predators in the libraries group of friends may give the teens a false sense of security.
Why would any teen expect a predator to be lurking in the libraries group of friends?
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