Myspace, Facebook: Safety Tips for Parents

Recent headlines are shocking and horrifying parents: Young adults are getting sucked into the MySpace trend and forgetting the "don't take candy from strangers" rule that has been instilled into their minds since kindergarten. Teens are disappearing because they are careless, and there's not much adults can do about it. At a time when every abduction story is more tragic than the last, it is important to remember some simple steps to create a secure account on MySpace and similar sites.

The MySpace frenzy began a few years ago and has recently exploded in popularity. On this site, myspace.com, users sign up for a free online profile to network with friends. Each profile has space for the user to upload 12 pictures, list favorite musicians and movies, and keep a blog. In addition, people who are friends with the user can leave comments. When signing up, MySpace provides a questionnaire for users to fill outage, location, relationship status, income, and much more. Although users can choose to fill out as little or as much of this as they want, most users simply complete they entire questionnaire in hopes that it will attract more friends.

After all, the goal of many MySpacers is to attract "friends"other users on the site who find their profile attractive. This may be a real-life friend from school or someone thousands of miles away who found you randomly when surfing the site. Countless website outside of the MySpace community are devoted to layouts, icons, and special features users can add to their sites to make it shine and lure more of these random friends.

The danger comes when teens get so caught up with drawing in new friends that they start adding more and more personal information to their profiles. It is also popular for younger users to lie about age, since MySpace users are technically supposed to be 16. Officials from MySpace, which has millions of users in its network and is growing larger every day, simply can't traffic the entire site for kids who are blatantly lying.