MySpace offers parental tracking of teenagers' space
Having failed to find a workable age verfication system, MySpace is moving responsibility for protecting teenagers back to parents.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, project “Zephyr”, aims to appease critics who believe that access to teenagers’ networking space on MySpace is more open than on other social network sites, such as Facebook, which requires approval for each person to view a profile.
Zephyr alerts parents of name, age and location data which teens enter into their profile, logging the information in a password-protected file on a computer’s hard disk for parents to monitor. It doesn’t give parents access to other information, such as emails or profiles. However, this doesn’t prevent teenagers maintaining a profile with false age information from public access computers.
The new project hasn’t satisfied everyone. According to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, Zephyr “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”.
Via The Register
