Posted 30 May 2006 - 03:24 PM
Very interesting article in today's Sac Bee regarding who may look at your myspace page. I guess something to think about, in regards to what you post on your page, is whether or not you'd want the following people looking at it: teachers, police, potential employers, potential landlords and/or college admissions personnel.
Many eyes on teens' space
Law enforcement combs popular Web site where youths let it all hang out.
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:01 am PDT Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Ken White's cursor slides past beer bottles, lingerie and profanity to linger over a dark-haired teen with one hip thrust out and her midriff bared.
"If that was my 17-year-old, she'd be grounded," White mutters, before clicking on through the younger kids who scatter images of their faces, favorite songs and occasional misdeeds in glittery type across the Internet.
For White, a Placer County sheriff's deputy charged with reaching out to middle schools, the daily forays on the wildly popular MySpace.com provide a window into a world kids think of as their own.
He scans for the faces of youngsters whom teachers or principals are worried about. He reads up on hobbies, to break the ice during one-on-one talks. He watches for party announcements, for angry outbursts, for bullying.
"Usually, first thing in the morning, I'm on MySpace," often for an hour or two a day, he said.
While it's hard to find a teen who hasn't been warned about online predators, some have no idea that their hottest virtual hangout is also attracting police, coaches and principals. Scholarship committees or college entrance screeners may be checking in, too, according to privacy watchdogs.
"Part of me says that's kind of not fair," said Lilly Bechtel, 13, an eighth-grader at Brannan Middle School in Sacramento. She can see why authorities might be interested, but still, "MySpace is a place where you should be able to be yourself."
That's why she's there.
The free Web site has built a huge following among teens, young adults and musicians, offering a ready-to-personalize space where users can easily display photos, songs, videos, blogs and hundreds of "friends," each with a photo and link to that friend's page.
"It's all you," said Bechtel, an unabashed "MySpace addict" who decorates her site with Alice in Wonderland figures, a sparkling Elmo and a soundtrack by German pop singer Cascada. Bechtel said she's there all the time, catching up with friends, fielding chain letters and corresponding with her dad while he's overseas. Like many others, she has sidestepped MySpace's minimum age requirement of 14, signing up with a birthdate that would make her 100. Her parents know she exaggerated her age to use the service.
Older generations sometimes compare MySpace and other social networking sites with the telephone, but the new methods are far more powerful than that, said Elisheva Gross, a social and developmental psychologist at UCLA who studies online communication among adolescents.
"It's not only the telephone, it's the mix tape and the yearbook entry and the locker decorations and the diary … all rolled into one," she said. "There's this combination of self-expression and friendship networking, which is understandably incredibly appealing."
Last month, MySpace drew 38.4 million unique visitors, far outdistancing sites like Blogger, Yahoo! Groups and Xanga, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The market research company said that overall, the top 10 social networking sites grew 47 percent based on number of unique visitors in the past 12 months.
The same features that fans love are a gold mine for law enforcement.
"I already have a bank full of gangsters," said Rayann VonSchoech, a community services officer with Sacramento Police Department's gang suppression unit. "Once I get to one, it's very easy to get to others."
Using names or nicknames drawn from arrests or investigative work, she's bookmarked around 30 MySpace pages to check every few days, looking for who's carrying a gun, who's threatening to disrupt a concert, and whose face goes with which street name.
"It's a huge tool, a great tool," said Sacramento Police Detective Sam Blackmon, who estimates Internet-related clues contribute to about 10 percent of the city's gang arrests.
Whether officers are dealing with serious crimes or with youngsters whose worst offenses are inappropriate insults, they travel a similar investigative path.
Start with a name or an event or an area. Find a person connected to it and then drill down, through friends and friends of friends, visiting their sites, riffling through their pictures, reading the correspondence they display publicly, and making printouts of anything incriminating.
At the middle school level, White is more likely to be looking for bullying than anything else. Deputy Ryan Berry, White's counterpart at Del Oro High in Loomis, keeps an eye out for parties that are announced to the world, letting patrol officers know where the big bashes will be.
Berry recently spotted a photo of a bong that led to a student's arrest on drug and weapons charges.
The deputies say that even when youngsters use aliases, their pictures, their friends' sites or other details often make them easy to track down. And even when a student's own site is fairly innocent, his or her face can still turn up in someone else's photo album of raunchy parties or worse, captured in embarrassing or illegal moments.
Although officers consider MySpace one of their best resources, it's just the latest in a long line of Internet sites that have been patrolled for years. Police look for stolen property on craigslist and eBay and watch for prostitutes in online personals.
In Davis, officers still are chuckling over the anonymous tip that a young woman's blog on LiveJournal.com had breathlessly recounted stealing street signs.
Around the county, news articles detail Internet-related arrests, firings or expulsions of taggers who posed with their graffiti, racists with their regalia, or underage drinkers with their bottles.
Davis publicized the street sign arrest partly to remind youngsters that they have no idea who is looking at what they put online, said police Lt. Colleen Turay. It could be parents, police or a predator.
Police and some vigilante groups look for child molesters online, and schools try to drill into youngsters the risks of revealing personal information or agreeing to meet in person. Every teen interviewed by the Bee was able to rattle off a list of things to avoid and ways to stay safe.
Yet most predators still find their victims through old-fashioned routes. The Sacramento County District Attorney's Office estimates that less than 5 percent of its cases involving sex crimes against children began with an Internet encounter.
For young people on the Net, "I think the risk of your reputation being tarnished is higher than your risk of being contacted by a predator," said Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Givens worries much less about police than about employers, landlords or colleges.
"College scholarship administrators and others are known to consult these public forums and find out about an applicant," she said.
Some smaller colleges monitor MySpace in an effort to expel underage drinkers, she said, and a recent survey found that three-fourths of employers do an Internet search on applicants and one-fourth say they've eliminated applicants because of something they found.
People don't realize the risk because they may never know it happened.
"How would you know you didn't get the job because someone read your blog?" she asked. "How do you know you didn't get that apartment rental because the landlord did a quick search and found out you like to have midnight parties?"
While there have been cases of people manufacturing phony Web pages to make someone else look bad, the risk of being judged by truthful information you post yourself is all too real.
Givens' group advises anyone with strong political beliefs, unconventional habits, health issues or dangerous hobbies to use a pseudonym on the Internet.
Police urge kids to keep a lower profile online by using a MySpace feature that lets them set their site to private, readable only by those who've been given permission.
Justin Fong, 14, a Brannan Middle School eighth-grader, hadn't bothered with the privacy setting, figuring he was savvy enough to take care of himself.
That was before a reporter asked him how he'd feel about police, teachers or others reading his page. Fong thought awhile about his low-key space, with nothing unfit for adult consumption, before concluding that teachers, cousins, even parents were no problem. But police, "I don't know why, it feels kind of weird," he said.
"I'm changing it to private when I get home."
