Family-friendly social networking site accuses popular sites of profit before responsibility

EasySite.com, a subscription-based family-friendly social networking site, has called out the likes of Facebook and MySpace for putting revenue and profit before taking responsibility for the privacy and safety of their users.

They cite the usual horror stories of paedophiles stalking teenagers, false profiles, and compromising photographs.

“Sites like MySpace and Facebook choose popularity over responsibility. Popularity means more traffic, which means more ads served and ultimately more money,” saidSteve Sivulka, CEO of Easysite.com. “Easysite has chosen a different path. From day one we created Easysite as a family-friendly website builder with safety and security in mind.”

EasySite prides itself as being ad-free, instead being supported by users paying for the service itself.

Sivulka says that people don’t realise how expensive “free” really is, suggesting that most services are advertising based and place ads on pages the individual user may believe to be theirs.

“A friend of mine found this out the hard way,” he says. “After sending out a link to his newly created personal website, friends and family complained that pop-up ads with strippers on them were appearing on his site. Some ‘free’ services will even send out junk email (spam), sell your personal information to other companies, or track your movements online to better target ads to you.”

I’m all for the concept of more family-friendly sites like EasySite, but I’m a little concerned that they seem to suggest that they’re the solution, when in fact people placing reliance upon their services could still face problems elsewhere.

Firstly, EasySite can do nothing to stop someone else publishing false information about you on another social networking site, blog, or forum.

Neither can it stop other people from publishing compromising photographs of you, if in fact you got yourself into an embarrassing situation in the first place.

While it’s true that some sites like Facebook do target adverts based on what a user does, this isn’t much different to what supermarkets do based on your purchase history, or what companies who conduct consumer surveys do. While some adverts may be questionable, responsible sites don’t show porn. Neither should users be under any illusion that a profile page (such as that which would be set up on Facebook, Bebo, or MySpace) belongs to them.

Finally, while some users might be content to stay in “safe” sites like EasySite.com (and I personally don’t believe a 100% safe web site exists) there’s a whole Internet out there which many people want to explore. That’s the time children and adults need to know how to keep themselves safe.

Social networking sites should take more responsibility for protecting minors, particularly as preteens are using these sites even though they shouldn’t be.

Staying safe online requires parental knowledge and openness.

I’m all for sites like EasySite.com, but they’re only a part of the solution to a safer Internet experience.

Young children using online social networks, three-quarters of parents “spying” on them

It must be something about the school summer holidays that’s bringing out surveys about children and parents and their relationship with the Internet… and each other.

Not a week after a survey about parental knowledge of their children’s online activities comes another from Garlik.

This one suggests that 75% of parents are monitoring what their children get up to online without their knowledge, by logging in to their social networking accounts, or setting up their own profiles so that they can “spy” on their kids.

The survey of 1,000 children aged from 8-15, and 1,030 parents, also found that children as young as eight are visiting web sites which aren’t meant for under-12s, including the social network phenomena of Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

More worrying is that around two-thirds of children admitted to posting information that could help identify them individually, such as mobile phone numbers and where they go to school. One in five had even met up with people they’d only befriended online.

Garlik, a company involved in the prevention of online fraud and identity theft, said that web sites needed to do more to prevent underage children from accessing them. However, parents are also responsible for what their children get up to online, and while spying may seem a bit drastic, there are things families can do to minimise the risks.

(Via Pocket Lint)