Another Novato Teen, if irresponsible kids should be kept offine, do you have suggesitons as to how they can be kept offline? Advice from a teen would be welcome!
Anne
BlogSafety.com co-director

Kim, send the URLs and the kids' ages to me at admin@blogsafety.com, and I'll see if I can help. All best,
Anne
BlogSafety.com co-director

Thanks for your post, Kim. A couple of things might be helpful. First of all, MySpace folk say they delete underage profiles right away because that's a clear violation of their Terms of Use, and I tend to believe them. It could be they didn't have enough information from you. Did you send them the URLs of both the profiles? Otherwise it's tough to find and delete specific profiles among the 100 million+ on the site. You don't need their emails, just the Web addresses of their MySpace pages (like www.myspace.com/12345678 or or myspace.com/suzysmith) to do that. Let us know if you included the URLs and got no response and maybe we can help.

Second, you do understand that profile deletion is more like winning a battle than the overall "war," right? Even when you do succeed in having their profiles deleted, your kids can immediately establish new accounts, either at MySpace or other social networks, on a computer at a friend's house if not at yours. Many kids have multiple profiles at MySpace (often there's one parents can see and at least one "underground" one) or one each at several social sites.

As you know well, it's not easy dealing with rebellious kids now that we all have Web 2.0, largely driven by kids. Have you tried explaining to your kids why you're concerned about their profiles, about the adults contacting them, about the news reports you've read about some kids who agreed to meet offline with people they don't know? You might consider allowing them to have profiles but establishing your own MySpace account so you can check in on them every now and then, or requiring that you're on their friends lists for the same purpose (a rule some parents establish) - because you need to know what's going on. If they signed up as 16+ and don't have privacy features turned on, you don't even need your own account; you can monitor just with their URLs. If they say they don't want their friends to see you on their lists, that's no problem - you just make up a funky screenname other than your real name or something like "suzysmom" so no one would even know who you are. There are also monitoring tools to make it all more convenient for you (email me at admin@blogsafety.com if you want some names or check out my newsletter, netfamilynews.org, Friday afternoon for a feaure on this). In any case, it really does help - if at all possible - to keep parent-child communication lines open because it is so easy for kids to go into stealth mode on the social Web.

I hope this helps. Please let us know how it goes.
Anne
BlogSafety.com co-director