An Internet safety study (PDF) just released by Cox Communications shows that teens may be a bit more safety conscious than previously thought.

The survey, which was done by Harris Interactive, asked 655 13 to 18 year olds about their online and cell phone behavior, specifically addressing issues of cyberbullying and sexting. The study was in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and America’s Most Wanted Host, John Walsh.

(Credit: Cox Communications Teen Online & Wireless Survey)

For the purposes of the study, cyberbullying was defined as “harassment, embarrassment or threats online or by text message” while sexting referred to “sending sexually suggestive text or emails with nude or nearly-nude photos.”

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of teens (72%) have a social networking profile while 73% use cell phones and 91% have an email address.

What they “know” vs. what they do

The study raises an interesting contradiction. 59% of the teens say that posting personal information or photos on public blogs or social networking sites is either “somewhat unsafe” or “very unsafe.” Only 7% say it’s “very safe” while 34% say it’s “somewhat safe.” Yet, when asked about their own behavior, 62% of the kids post photos of themselves, 50% share their real age, 45% the name of their school and 41% the city where they live. When it comes to more private information, only 4% post their address, 9% “places where you typically go” and 14% post their cell phone number.

The study’s executive summary explains, “Though they are aware of the risks, many teens expose personal information about themselves online anyway.”

That revelation appears alarming but after looking at other research about teen online risk, I actually find it reassuring.

What kids say they “know” about online risks appears to be what adults have been telling them for years. But when you look the real risk factors, their behavior isn’t nearly as dangerous as even teens say they think it is.

An in-depth and academically rigorous 2005 study from the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center found that posting personal information online does not, by itself, correlate with risk. As all of the studies show, millions of kids engage in this practice and very few encounter any serious problem as a result. Let’s face it, the whole premise behind sites like Facebook and MySpace is to share that type of information and despite some of the hysteria, there have been very few reported problems of young people being victimized as a result of them putting this type of information online.

Of course, nothing – including attending school – is 100% safe but the 34% who said that posting personal information online is “somewhat safe” are getting it right.

Cyberbullying and sexting numbers not as bad as thought

The cyberbullying numbers are also quite reassuring, especially when you compare them to some earlier studies.

The summary points out that “Cyberbullying is widespread among today’s teens, with over one-third having experienced it, engaged in it, or know of friends who have who have done either.” But that one-third is cumulative of bullies, people who have been bullied and even people who know someone who’s been bullied.

The survey found that approximately 19% of teens say they’ve been cyberbullied online or via text message and that 10% say they’ve cyberbullied someone else. The largest group, 27% say they have “seen or heard of a friend who was bullied” online and while 16% say they’ve “seen or heard of a friend who’s bullied others online or by cell phone.

Of course any amount of bullying is unacceptable but the numbers from this survey are lower than several previous studies.

There is also good news about sexting. The most widely quoted study on sexting from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported (pdf) that 20% of teens “say they have sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.” But the data from the Cox survey showed that while 20% of teens “have engaged in sexting” that number, too, is cumulative. Only 9% “sent a sext” while 17% received one and 3% forwarded a “sext.” Again, that 9% number is too high but it’s less than half the 20% figure commonly used. And 90% of the kids who sent sexts said that nothing bad happened, even though 74% of the kids agreed that sexting is “wrong.” 23% felt that it’s OK if both parties are OK with it and only 3% said “there is nothing wrong with it.”

This survey, said Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use Executive Director, Nancy Willard, “clearly demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of young people have not engaged in risk-taking online behavior or been harmed online. Also, it appears that teens are sensitive to the potentially damaging implications of the material they post online.

The Internet and the way young people use technology are constantly evolving, but the safety messages change very slowly, if at all.

Like technology itself, Internet safety has to evolve. Back in 1994, when I wrote the first widely disseminated Internet safety publication, I advised parents not to let kids put personal information or photos online and — because of what turned out to be an exaggerated fear of predators — I urged them to avoid online conversations with strangers. Back then, along with trying to keep kids away from porn, Internet safety was mostly about protecting children from dangerous adults.

But starting around 2005, a new phase of the Web — often referred to as “Web 2.0″ — prompted some Internet safety advocates to focus on ways kids could get in trouble for what they post on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. It was in that year that Anne Collier and I founded BlogSafety.org (later renamed ConnnectSafely.org) so we could provide a forum for discussing safety issues on the Web. It was also around that time that politicians and the media, especially the TV show “To Catch a Predator,” started whipping up fears of predators trolling the Web for vulnerable children.

But after carefully reviewing available research, statistics show that the likelihood of a young person being harmed by an online stranger is quite rare, and sexual solicitations and harassment are most often from peers. And to the extent it has occurred, it affects teens, not young children. Based on studies by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, the overwhelming majority of crimes against youths continue to take place in the “real world,” mostly by adults known to the child.

But that doesn’t mean that the Internet is a risk-free zone. It’s just that young people are far more likely to be harmed by other youth or the consequences of their own online behavior than by adult criminals.

Their interactions are largely with people they know from the real world. As danah boyd (she prefers a lower case d & b) observed in her doctoral dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF), “teen participation in social network sites is driven by their desire to socialize with peers. Their participation online is rarely divorced from offline peer culture; teens craft digital self-expressions for known audiences and they socialize almost exclusively with people they know.”

This understanding of youth risk led to a whole new phase of Internet safety education focusing on such things as cyberbullying and urging youth to avoid posting material that could be embarrassing or get them into trouble with authorities and potential future employers. Recently, the focus has turned to the emotional and legal consequences of “sexting,” — kids sending nude pictures of themselves via cell phones or the Web. But Anne Collier observed in NetFamilyNews.org, we run the risk of “technopanics” over sexting and bullying.

What we’ve learned from observing how kids use the Net, mobile phones, gaming devices and other interactive technology is that there is really no distinction between online and offline behaviors. Technology is woven into their lives. They don’t go online, they ARE online. So it’s really about youth safety — not Internet safety.

It’s about helping young people make wise choices not just in how they use technology but in how they live their lives. Internet safety is more than just the absence of danger. It also includes finding ways to use technology for learning, collaboration, community building, political activism, self-help and reaching out to others.

These are not just philosophical arguments. They’re pragmatic because preaching about safety or trying lock down the Internet doesn’t protect kid. Trying to instill fear — especially based on myths — actually increases danger because it causes kids to tune out good advice.

Sure, there are technologies that can keep kids from using social networking services or visiting inappropriate Web sites. But, like fences around swimming pools, the use of filters at home and school can’t protect them forever. That’s why we teach kids to swim. Not only does knowing how to swim help prevent drowning, it empowers them to thrive in the water instead of fearing it. The same is true with technology. As kids mature into teens, we must pull back on the technological controls in favor of self-control.

In an email interview,  Dr. Larry Rosen, Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills and author of Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation observed, “sadly, too many parents think that using technology to track their children’s keystrokes or restrict access to certain websites is sufficient parenting.  It is not.  Parents must be involved with their children’s virtual lifestyles developing trust, being aware of any potential problems, learning about the technologies they use, and communicating often.”

WASHINGTON — Last year, Congress passed the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,which called for yet another committee to study Internet safety. By statute, the Online Safety and Technology Working Group is made up of representatives of the business community, public interest groups and federal agencies. I’m on the committee as co-director of the nonprofit ConnectSafely.org.  ConnectSafely co-director and NetFamilyNews editor Anne Collier serves as co-chairman along with MySpace cheif security officer, Hemanshu Nigam.

The group, which reports to the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is totally unfunded. The government wasn’t even able to buy us lunch, let alone plane tickets to Washington. But I’m not complaining. It’s an honor to have even a small role in helping to shape national Internet safety policy.

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about the working group, wondering why we needed yet another committee to look at this topic. In 2000, the “COPA Commission,” created by the Children’s Online Protection Act of 1998, issued a very comprehensive report, and last year I was privileged to serve on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force — created by attorneys general of nearly every state.

The task force issued a report debunking myths about Internet safety, concluding that kids are more at risk from other kids than from so-called Internet predators. That finding was rejected by several of the state attorneys general who received it. South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said the report’s findings were “as disturbing as they are wrong,” adding that “the conclusions in this report create a troubling false sense of security on the issue of child Internet safety.”

But I think the report was both accurate and insightful. It recognized that Internet safety is too complicated to be reduced to sound bites and sensationalist TV shows, and that most of the kids who get in trouble online also get in trouble offline. The Internet may amplify dangers, but it doesn’t create them. › Continue reading…

”Sexting” is the practice of taking a sexually revealing picture of yourself, typically from a cell phone, and sending it to someone. Legal consequences aside, it’s a dumb thing to do, especially for younger age groups in which it has become something of a fad.

Even if you are comfortable with the person receiving the image, you never know for sure where else it might land. Digital images are easy to copy and forward and, even if you trust your friend’s discretion, it can be accidentally forwarded or seen by others with access to your friend’s phone or computer. It’s not uncommon for such images to find their way to other people’s cell phones and even Web pages, where they can be seen by anyone, copied, searched for and redistributed, perhaps forever.

For minors, there’s another risk — serious legal consequences. Creating, transmitting and even possessing a nude, semi-nude or sexually explicit image of a minor can be considered child pornography. It can be prosecuted as a state or federal felony and can even lead to having to register as a sex offender.

Crazy as it seems, some prosecutors have gone after kids for taking and sending pictures of themselves. There was a case in Florida a couple of years ago where a teenage boy and girl photographed themselves nude and engaged in “unspecified sexual behavior.” One kid sent the picture to the other and somehow the police got involved. They were tried and convicted for production and distribution of child porn and the teen who received the image had the additional charge of possession. An appeals court upheld the convictions.

In January this year, three teenage girls from Pennsylvania were charged for creating child porn and the three boys who received the images were charged for possessing it. And, according to CBS News, a Texas eighth-grader in October spent a night in jail after a coach found a nude picture on his cell phone, sent by another student. › Continue reading…

Facebook’s privacy settings, in most cases, don’t permit you to expose your information to everyone on the Web. By default, the settings typically show your profile and other data only to “My Networks and Friends.” While that might include a lot of people, it doesn’t include the entire world.

These settings can be modified, but most of them can only be tightened. With a few exceptions, you don’t even have the option to make a lot of your information available to the public at large. One exception is media files such as photos and videos, which, by default, can be viewed by “everyone.” But you can use privacy settings to restrict who can see your photos all the way down to specific friends or even “only me.”

Video – How to configure settings

Mouse over to privacy settings

Start by hovering your mouse over the “Settings” tab near the upper-right corner and select Privacy Settings. There you’ll find options to control who can see your profile as well as other information about you, such as your “personal info,” status updates, photos, videos tagged of you, and who your friends are. You can control who can see your profile within Facebook and you can turn off access to public search engines such as Google. There are plenty of other settings, including ones to control who can write on your wall and who can comment on notes, photos, or other elements of your site.
Settings vary according to what you’re trying to control and, because of the confusing user interface, you might have to hunt around a bit. For example, to change the privacy settings on your own photo albums within the Privacy Settings area you would have to find the fine print under Photos Tagged of You that says “Edit Photo Albums Privacy Settings” or navigate from the Applications tray at the bottom left corner of your browser. That “privacy wizard” they’re working on can’t come a moment too soon.

Another relatively unknown feature is the ability to create multiple friends lists and assign different privileges to people on different lists. For example, if you want only certain people to know your cell phone number you can create a list like “good friends” and another called “colleagues” to make that information available only to people on those lists. You can create lists by clicking on the Friends tab on the blue navigation bar and then clicking on “Make a New List” in the left column.

Third party applications

Be especially careful when it comes to third-party applications. For example, I use an application from Eye-Fi that automatically syncs my photos to Facebook and Flickr through my Wi-Fi network. When I review cameras, I often take ugly and stupid test pictures and, if I’m not careful, those pictures can be automatically loaded to my Facebook page for everyone to see. But my most embarrassing moment was about a year ago, when I tried out the New York Times Quiz on a day I hadn’t read the paper, only to have my low score posted for all my Facebook friends to see, including my editor at The New York Times.

Regardless of how you configure your privacy settings, there is a reality of the social Web that can’t be configured away. Any digital information that is posted can be copied, captured, cached, forwarded, and reposted by anyone who has access to it. Even if some embarrassing photo or information is up for only a few minutes, there is the possibility that someone might copy it and send it around. And–as many people are painfully aware–friends can become ex-friends. So even if you’re reasonably careful about who you let on your page, you never know what they might do with the information you post.

by Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews

Facebook was smart to go back to its previous terms of use while it conducts this terms-of-use-updating experiment in a spotlighted Petrie dish in what seems like the middle of Mumbai’s Victoria Station at rush hour (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “Update on Terms”). And this is indeed a giant (global) societal experiment, as we the people (the content producers and distributors) and they the companies (the content co-distributors and hosts) – not to mention policymakers and other overseers and observers – figure out who is responsible and to what degree for protecting the content producer, aka user. Because the social Web is largely a user-produced and user-controlled medium, clearly (to me, anyway) the responsibility is shared. Educating users about that is a challenge all by itself, witness the general lack of close attention to privacy options (see “10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know”), but factor in developing teenage brains learning impulse control and shared responsibility at the same time, and the user-protection challenge grows significantly (see PBS Frontline’s “The Teenage Brain”).

I said Facebook’s smart in my lead up there because, in going back to its previous terms-of-use version, it’s buying time for the process of folding user input into the new terms’ development process and this giant experiment is also about user (and societal) education. It needs time. There are factors involved that only a few of the privacy bloggers are writing about (e.g., author Daniel Solove), including the tension between consumer privacy pressures and those from law enforcement to hand over as well as retain user data after users have closed their accounts. But time is short, too. Though this social and media experiment – and consensus-building in general – take time, Facebook doesn’t have a whole lot, given the climate outside the Petrie dish. The predator panic recently brought into perspective by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force is a good illustration of how worst-case scenarios and fears tend to eclipse the public discussion about the social Web – to the detriment of child safety (see the New York Times and my post on that). Why to the detriment? Because kids usually want to get far away from scared, worked-up parents; they go “underground” online, where parents aren’t in the mix. Never the best scenario. [Thanks to UK privacy researcher Tara Taubman for pointing out a few of the links below.]

Here are other reports and commentaries worth reading

Audio interview with both Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly by CNET/CBS tech analyst Larry Magid (Larry is also my co-director at ConnectSafely.org)
A lawyer’s view on Facebook’s 180 and how enforceable terms of use are anyway (Maxwell S. Kennerly in Philadelphia)
University of Wisconsin information studies Prof. Michael Zimmer’s very critical view of Facebook’s process
Internet consultant and blogger David Silversmith on the technical and monetary realities and then “plain old reality”
The Guardian on how people definitely do read the “fine print” in social sites (vs. grocery store loyalty cards)
Coverage at the Washington Post and New York Times.
The Internet Safety Technical Task Force report

by Larry Magid

I’ve been an Internet safety advocate since 1993 and right now I’m discouraged and angry about what’s going on in this field.

I’m angry because people who ought to know better are trying to mislead the public with false information about online risks, which is diverting attention away from real risks. And I’m not alone.

Many respected online safety organizations and leading youth-risk researchers are trying to shift the discussion away from mostly predator danger to youth behavior risk. Thanks to some politicians, it’s an uphill battle.

Online safety groups and public officials should be spending our time educating families on how to avoid real risks that affect most kids – like bullying, harassment and unwanted exposure to inappropriate material. We also need to do a better job of identifying and reaching the small minority of “at risk” kids who are putting themselves at greater risk by the way they behave online. › Continue reading…

by Larry Magid

A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared. The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.

The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general. › Continue reading…

By Hemanshu Nigam

It’s New Year’s Eve, and your teen is all decked out and ready for a big party. She’s got her iPhone, BlackBerry, or some other cell phone with a camera in her pocketbook. And she’s ready to roll. You’re glad she’s got these gadgets so you can get in touch with her. You tell her to call to check in, to let you know she got there safely, to ask for permission to stay later. She agrees. You give her a quick hug and run upstairs to get ready for your own party to celebrate the arrival of a new beginning. You even remember to put the new digital camera you got for Christmas by your purse so you don’t forget it. › Continue reading…

Reposted from San Jose Mercury News
December 8, 2008

by Larry Magid

What Lori Drew allegedly did to Megan Meier was despicable, but it doesn’t justify her conviction late last month for violating federal laws designed to keep hackers from invading computer networks.
Two years ago, Megan, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself after her online friend “Josh Evans,” who had befriended her on MySpace, reportedly told her that he didn’t want to be friends with her and that the world would be better off without her. But Josh was in fact Drew, a 49-year-old mother of one of Megan’s former friends.

According to published reports, Megan had been mean to Drew’s daughter and Josh’s fake online relationship with Megan was a way for Drew to retaliate. › Continue reading…