CyberStalked!

This is the only arti­cle I’ve ever seen about online safety while job hunt­ing. It’s par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant right now, too!

Job Hunt­ing Safely

Nowa­days, nearly every one I know and their mama is look­ing for a job. Job search­ing used to mean scan­ning the clas­si­fieds in your local paper, but these days your job search prob­a­bly means a lot of time spent on the Inter­net. And the Inter­net is a fab­u­lous place to find the lat­est job list­ings from com­pa­nies right next door or all the way around the world. 

If a good por­tion of your day is spent refresh­ing the pages on Craigslist, you have prob­a­bly seen some list­ings that seem too good to be true. Maybe your intu­ition has told you to be wary, but with more and more Amer­i­cans run­ning out of their unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits, you may just feel des­per­ate enough to lower your guard and take the risk. Unfor­tu­nately, you don’t have to look too hard to find sto­ries of crimes that began with con­tact through web­sites like Craigslist.

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A new study pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary issue of Archives of Pedi­atrics & Ado­les­cent Med­i­cine has con­tra­dicted much of the com­mon advice given by inter­net safety author­i­ties. The behav­ior most likely to lead to vic­tim­iza­tion is not sim­ply shar­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion online. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with strangers is far more dan­ger­ous, espe­cially if the com­mu­ni­ca­tion is sexual.

Pat­tern of Behav­iors Linked to Online Victimization

…the study found that talk­ing with peo­ple only known online under cer­tain con­di­tions is asso­ci­ated with online inter­per­sonal vic­tim­iza­tion, but shar­ing infor­ma­tion is not.

“Aggres­sive behav­ior in the form of mak­ing rude or nasty com­ments or fre­quently embar­rass­ing oth­ers, meet­ing peo­ple in mul­ti­ple ways and talk­ing about sex online with unknown peo­ple were sig­nif­i­cantly related to online inter­per­sonal vic­tim­iza­tion,” they continue.

“With one in five youth who use the Inter­net report­ing an unwanted inter­per­sonal vic­tim­iza­tion in one year’s time, iden­ti­fy­ing effec­tive Inter­net safety mes­sages is an ado­les­cent health issue of great impor­tance,” the authors conclude. 

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Filed under: Psychology, Safety Tips, news

I don’t even like MySpace. Why do I find myself defend­ing the nasty thing? But here I am.

I sup­pose this story has been spread far and wide now, fur­ther­ing the attempt to make MySpace respon­si­ble for every preda­tor who has ever set up shop on their servers. 

Four fam­i­lies have sued the pop­u­lar social-networking site MySpace and its owner, News Corp., after their teenage daugh­ters were solicited online and sex­u­ally abused by adults they met on the site, lawyers for the fam­i­lies said Thursday.

(snip)

“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to insti­tute mean­ing­ful secu­rity mea­sures that effec­tively increase the safety of their under­age users,” Arnold and Itkin lawyer Jason Itkin said in a statement.

“Blam­ing the fam­i­lies of abuse vic­tims who were solicited online, as some have done, is a cyn­i­cal excuse that ignores the fact that social net­work­ing sites can lead to heinous abuse by Inter­net preda­tors,” said Adam Loewy of Barry & Loewey. “It is now clear that MySpace rec­og­nizes that seri­ous secu­rity prob­lems exist.” 

Right. Where were these par­ents while their daugh­ters were chat­ting away? How long did that go on before their daugh­ters encoun­tered the preda­tors in per­son? Where where they when their daugh­ters met these adults in person? 

How likely is it that the par­ents were actu­ally super­vis­ing their children’s inter­net use? Very unlikely, to be hon­est. I know that first­hand, unfor­tu­nately. I’ll lay money on the fact that they gave their kids com­put­ers just like they’d given them TVs, stuck them in their bed­rooms, gave them unlim­ited (or nearly so) inter­net access, and let them go. Have fun, glad you aren’t bug­ging us!

Par­ent­ing is work. Super­vis­ing your chil­dren takes time and effort. Suer­pvis­ing your children’s inter­net access takes that and edu­cat­ing your­self and your kids, invest­ing in tech­ni­cal tools, installing them, keep­ing them and your knowl­edge up to date, and hav­ing a good, trust­ing, open rela­tion­ship with your chil­dren. Oh—did I for­get to men­tion that first?

Your rela­tion­ship with your chil­dren is the sin­gle most impor­tant fac­tor in keep­ing them safe any where, any time. If you do not gain their trust and respect, they won’t have any rea­son to lis­ten to any­thing you say, or to obey any guide­lines you put in place. In fact, they’ll go to extra lengths to get around the road­blocks just because they’re there!

You have to pro­tect your chil­dren. Not MySpace. Not AOL or Yahoo! or your ISP or the police or their schools or the phone com­pany or “the gov­ern­ment.” It’s all 100% up to you. You have all of the rights as far as deter­min­ing what they can and can­not access, and you have all of the respon­si­bil­ity when you screw that up. Even if it results in them hook­ing up with sex­ual predators.

Am I say­ing that the fam­i­lies are guilty of the sex­ual abuse? No, not at all. That shouldn’t have hap­pened to their daugh­ters. But the fam­i­lies are guilty of not pro­tect­ing their chil­dren, and these law­suits are absolutely crim­i­nal in try­ing to shift that blame. 

While I haven’t seen the suits, obvi­ously, to me it looks way too much like the fam­i­lies are try­ing to make money off their children’s suf­fer­ing. And that is almost as sick as the preda­tors who attacked the chil­dren in the first place.

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Filed under: Safety Tips