MySpace - Caveat Emptor

MySpace Hit With On-line Predator Suits Jan 18th - 11:21pm By JESSICA MINTZ AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) - Four families have sued News Corp. and its MySpace social-networking site after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, lawyers for the families said Thursday. (WTOP News)

"In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users," said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer.

This is just an arrogant statement by Mr. Itkin. Shall we review?

The parents suing MySpace have children that are 15 years old. That makes the parents, given the law of averages and general biology, at least as old as I am - in other words, old enough to 1) know better 2) pay better attention to what their children are doing on-line 3) have instilled in them, at least a modicum of intelligence and awareness of their surroundings and the dangers inherent thereto.

To the parents out there, did you not teach your child not to talk to strangers? Not to believe everything they read and certainly NOT to go anywhere without knowing exactly what it was they were getting into? I am not suggesting for a moment that you swaddle them in extraneous safety gear. After all, we are the generation that did not wear helmets to ride bicycles and had our playground equipment mounted over concrete, but there are some very disturbed people out there. I went and checked out some of the profiles on MySpace, just for fun, and discovered that of the half dozen or so I could stomach, many were clearly fake (and I am thinking computer generated too) and it took me less than 10 seconds to come to this conclusion. The signs were all there. I am willing to bet that more than half of the people on the site are misrepresenting themselves, and that is a conservative estimate.

It is not, nor has it ever been MySpace's responsibility (or any other site really) to make sure their environment was "safe." Any assumption of that is a byproduct (and a bad one) of the training wheel mentality fostered by America On-Line and other "ISPs" that in the early days of the Internet sought to provide an entree into the rough and tumble (and frankly inhospitable, command-line, geek dominated) world of the inter-networked computer. What today is called the World Wide Web is only one of a dozen surviving protocols from those early days of pioneers that were more interested in making it work than "social networking" but for every successful venture, a few bad apples crop up and the Internet of today is nothing like the science experiment it started out to be, and it behooves us as users (and parents of users) to teach our children that the world is not a safe place and people lie to get what they want, and the more they want it, the more creative the lie. This case should be rejected out of hand and the parents bringing this sort of frivolous lawsuit should be indicted for child endangerment and gross stupidity.

Caveat Emptor. And carry a knife. You have been warned. The Internet is not now, nor has ever been a place for the faint of heart or the stupid of mind.