MySpace: What You Should Know

Social websites like Myspace and Facebook allow people to make new friends in cyberspace. But these websites mix together teenagers with criminals and detectives are now keeping an eye out. These sites have been popular with teenagers for the past few years. Visit any place with a computer, and youll most likely find teenagers surfing online, checking to see who left them comments. At Central Library today, we found a room full of 9th graders, doing that very thing. Lindsay has had myspace and notebook pages since last year but doesnt chat with anyone she doesnt know. 9th Grader Alex however is new to myspace, and they both agree, most of the kids at their school also use it. Some add people that they dont even know, and in some cases, thats a deadly mistake. This week 23-year old John Gaumer was sentenced in Maryland to life in prison for raping, beating and killing a woman he met through myspace. He was a senior at the University of Maryland when he committed the crime. Cases like this now have police online, working the cyber-beat. Police in Petersburg, Indiana recently obtained myspace messages to make a case against several people there accused of sexually abusing minors. Although myspace only allows a user to browse for someone between the ages of 18 to 68, it doesnt prohibit younger teens from having a page on the site. And even if it did, some teens list their age as being older, in some cases, around a hundred years old. One way to protect your teens identity is by setting their profile to private, this allows only their friends to see their myspace page and prohibits strangers surfing online. So if your child has a myspace or facebook page, you may want to check it out, before the police have to.