Social-networking  sites have become an integral part of life for most teens, with talk of collecting friends and tweaking profile pages peppering chatter both online and off. But if a Connecticut lawmaker has his way, access to the sites by underage users would require parental consent.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is urging sites such as MySpace and Xanga to require age verification and parental consent before allowing minors to post profiles. Blumenthal is helping lead a coalition of 44 states asking MySpace and its parent company, News Corp., to institute age verification in the hope of shielding minors from sexual predators.
His proposed legislation comes a day after a 23-year-old man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for using Myspace to arrange sexual contact with an 11-year-old Connecticut girl. In Connecticut, at least six alleged sexual assaults involving older men and underage girls have been tied to MySpace in the last year.
Parental Control
"Failing to verify ages means that children are exposed to sexual predators who may be older men lying to seem younger," Blumenthal said in a statement. "There is no excuse in technology or cost for refusing age verification. If we can put a man on the moon -- or invent the Internet -- we can reliably check ages."
Under the proposal, sites that fail to verify ages and fail to obtain parental permission to post profiles of users under 18 would face civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. The legislation also would allow individuals to bring private lawsuits against the sites. Information about parents would be checked and parents would be contacted directly when necessary.
Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at MySpace, said the social-networking site is deeply committed to protecting its teenage users through a combination of offline education and online tools. But he also said that the proposed bill is not the answer.
"We have and will continue to focus considerable resources on developing effective ways to make our site safer," Nigam said in a statement.
Teens Targeted
MySpace leads the social-networking pack with over 100 million users. The site's current policy prohibits kids under the age of 14 from creating profiles. But enforcement is tricky. On the site's terms-of-use page, it specifies that one's profile may be deleted and membership terminated without warning if site administrators believe the user is under 14 years of age.
Profiles of the site's youngest users -- ages 14 and 15 -- are hidden to people not on the user's list of friends. Others see just the username, age, location, and gender. But as a young user's network of friends expands, his or her risk of being contacted by a sexual predator expands as well.
According to the U. S. Department of Justice, one out of every seven kids is solicited for sex online. Because of this, law enforcement agencies and school administrators have warned parents and teens of the risks associated with the social-networking sites.
Blumenthal's bill, which is supported by endorsed by four other Connecticut lawmakers, is scheduled for a public hearing today.
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