Tag Archives: Bebo

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

One Click from Danger

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Hat tip to Ian over at Youthblog for pointing out the Panorama tonight – One Click from Danger.

I’ve blogged several times before about various aspects of online safety, in particular Bebo and Myspace including the irony of the fact that on the one hand we’ve had regular concerned parents asking us not to put pictures of their children on the Church website, and yet the ease with which we could find the profiles of a number of the members of the youth group.

The Panorama tonight showed exactly why I was concerned at some of the profiles – if I could find them, who else could?

I have to say, at points in the programme, my blood ran cold. It started off with two girls who when they were 14 accepted someone who claimed to be a 26 year old woman onto their friend list. It wasn’t, in actual fact it was a 55 year old predatory pedophile, who subsequently used information on their pages to turn up when they were on a school trip. Thankfully the two girls involved, despite being frightened managed to get a picture of the man leading to his subsequent arrest.

But it went on. The programme set up a honey pot – a perfectly innocuous profile of a 14 year old girl, which pretty quickly attracted attention. When it got onto the 16 year old who was essentially selling himself over his webcam the programme was really getting disturbing. Another disturbing aspect was the survey statistics comparing what the children were doing, with what the parents thought their children were doing.

I suspect I’m in somewhat of a minority in that having been around online for a while, I’m well aware of the ease with which people can hide their true identity online – indeed it was at University that I first came across someone who was totally different in real life when two people I knew arranged to meet a girl they’d been chatting to online, only to discover that they weren’t who they said they were – in fact it wasn’t even a girl… Having spent time on IRC when that was a popular online haunt I’ve got a catalogue of internet stories of a similar ilk.

Interestingly chatting about the programme today with a long time friend who was also on IRC around the same time, but whose now husband is relatively new to the internet, it seems that we have a very different attitude to people online. Both of us, although we have Windows Messenger, have the security settings turned fully on – i.e. the only people who can message us are people already on our list. The few people we’ve added recently have been people we’ve met in real life, rather than random online friends. Compare this to my friends husband, who has been randomly chatting to people on Windows Messenger – “how do you know who they are?â€? she asked – “because I’ve seen a picture.â€? came the reply.

A little story for you. Back on IRC I remember one of the regulars having a major crisis as they had built an online relationship with someone in the US, indeed they’d got as far as arranging to meet. The problem was that this person was very insecure about how they looked, so right back at the beginning of the relationship had sent a picture of their cousin, who they thought was much better looking. As a result, when a meeting in real life was a possibility, she then had told her friend that she had a phoney picture, and to send a real one – at which point he had called the whole thing off. It is really, really easy to use a phoney picture to disguise your identity, it is really, really easy to pretend to be something or someone you are not online. As with the IRC story, it could be that two lonely people got hurt, but equally it can be someone pretending to be what they are not. Parents warn their children of stranger danger in the real world, but it is doubly important in the online world. Just because they say they are someone and show you a picture, doesn’t mean that they are who they say they are.

The programme itself will be available online at the BBC iPlayer, and certainly if you’re a parent, or involved with young people at all it is well worth watching.

The programme talks to CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is a UK wide specialist police unit who also host the Think U Know site which includes resources and advice aimed at various age groups, and also information for parents, and teachers/youth leaders that could be used to talk about internet safety in a youth group situation.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Facebook Privacy Response

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After the earlier Facebook privacy concerns, the firms head of privacy has used the launch of a UK office to address the points raised.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic from the article is that following the publicity about the changes, 20% of users had updated their profile privacy settings.

There are a number of other interesting statistics too:

  • The UK is the fastest growing market, but unlike the USA it is attracting older users – 54% of UK users are over 25, and over 35’s are the fastest growing group.
  • Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the UK – currently MySpace and Bebo are bigger. However if the current growth continues Facebook is predicted to pass MySpace this month.
  • The opening up of the site has radically changed the demographics of the user base – 75% of users are now outside college.
  • The company has a revised target of 60,000,000 active users worldwide by the end of the year – the original target for the year, already surpassed, was 40,000,000.
  • The company identify the application platform as being a major growth factor – currently there are 3000 applications available, and apparently 80,000 developers working on the platform.

Anyway, the application platform has given me a way around one of my original annoyances, which was that a number of friends were primarily operating through Facebook and getting grumpy that my profile was largely empty. I’ve still got a largely empty profile – but thanks to a great little WordPress plug-in called Wordbook details of my posts on here are automatically placed into the mini-feed on Facebook. There were a number of variations around for integrating blogs, but this seemed to be the best for me as it was all automatic, plus it didn’t rely on dumping large amounts of my content into Facebook, or my having to manually select posts on the Facebook end to work. Alongside this I’ve also added a feed for my pictures from Flickr – again this is a tool that links back to the original pictures on Flickr rather than dumping all the data onto Facebook

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Knights that say Ning

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Ok, I know it’s a tenuous link – but I’m not the only one who instantly thought of Monty Python when I heard about Ning!

I have to say, that I hadn’t come across Ning until Scoble interviewed Marc Andreessen (of Netscape fame) and Gina Bianchini recently, and also filmed Gina giving a demo of the site.

Now I have to say, some of the time with these new web offerings I tend to have the “it’s cool but…” attitude – I can see that it is a nice idea, or a good concept, but often there isn’t enough to get me to switch from the way I am currently doing things, or whatever the site is doing doesn’t really appeal. However watching the video about version 2.0 of Ning was definitely one of those light bulb moments!

I’ve discussed before the concerns about the rise of Social Networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo, particularly with regards to the Child Protection issues. For example with the Church website we have strict rules over getting permission to use pictures of anyone under 18, and even then we can’t directly identify them, but then for many of the young people, all it takes is a few minutes on MySpace and Bebo and you can get really quite detailed information about them that they have quite happily posted for the whole internet to see. However, trying to control access to the sites, whether this be through an age limit (which doesn’t even need a fake ID to get around), or through site blocking, as both schools and parents have tried to do, really doesn’t address the issue – young people want to socialise, and doing so online is just a natural extension of what they do face to face. Unfortunately many of them will regard the age limits, or site blocks as an unnecessary restriction, without really realising the serious consequences and dangers implicit on what they post to the sites.

That leaves you with trying to find a way to facilitate this socialising online, so I know of people who have tried closed blog sites, discussion forums and so on, however all of that requires some degree of technical know how, so many have just signed up to MySpace and Bebo to keep an eye on their young people. However, Ning seems to address this issue straight on. Marc Andreessen mentions Churches several times in the video, however in terms of our congregation, where for many the level of technical literacy is relatively low, I’d suggest it would probably end up being an exclusive tool rather than an inclusive tool. However in addressing the issues with MySpace, Bebo and Child Protection it does seem an excellent solution. It makes it really easy to set up a Social Networking site for a Youth Group, whilst giving you the tools to control both access, and what is posted. In this way you can allow your group to share pictures and videos – the kind of things that would never get past the Child Protection policy for a fully public site, and to control access to the members of the group. It’s all fully customisable, but for the basic sites it is drag-and-drop simplicity, so you don’t need to be technical to get a basic site up and running. It will also allow members of the group to personalise their own pages too.

The main issues would be though, that it probably doesn’t have the street-cred of MySpace and Bebo, and also that by limiting access it wouldn’t be as straightforward to include the wider networks that some of the young people have on the major sites, however as an online place to extend the social aspects of a Youth Group it does seem ideal. Certainly, it does seem well worth checking out.

This first video is the interview, which is quite long and in places technical, but also includes some good comments about the rise of Social Networking, and the Internet as a whole – there is also an interesting discussion about which sites attract which age groups:

The second video is a lot shorter, and is basically an introduction to the features of Ning:

Alongside this, both TechCrunch and GigaOM have loads more detail in their reviews of the new version of the site.

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

The Popularity of MySpace and Bebo

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As I mentioned in my previous post, tonight we had our planning meeting for the summer term at Youth Group. As usual, the discussion at the meeting also included more general talk about areas of concern, one subject being the popularity amongst the young people of sites like Bebo and MySpace.

In terms of the Church web sites we now have pretty tight rules over the use of pictures of any young people. The rules have actually been tightened several times over the years following concerns expressed by various parents, so you’ll notice that there aren’t any pictures of the Youth Group on this site where the young people are identifiable – and we’ve also tried to make sure that the public photo sets have any pictures with children and young people removed.

However the irony is that you can fairly easily go on to both Bebo and MySpace and locate pages belonging to a large number of the young people in the Church, and of course since the sites encourage people to list their friends, you can from there track through from person to person, browse through photo albums, many of which are helpfully named so you know exactly who you are looking at. Essentially it is just young people socialising, but in an electronic form – however the big problem is how accessible it all is, and how easy it is to build up a picture of them.

Recently, the BBC has produced an article on the issue, and whilst the sites are arguing that they are posting warnings, and trying to educate users, they still have a site that is especially attractive to teenagers. As a result, it is still a matter of some concern to us as youth leaders, quite how much information can be obtained with little or no checks of the person getting the information.