ReputationDefender recently ran across this clever video that points out the real world consequences of social networking for teens and students. It was put together by a great nonprofit called ConnectSafely.org and is very well done.

ReputationDefender encourages parents to educate their children about online safety and their online reputation. Any readers have online teen safety tips? Let us know in the comments!

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Many parents are concerned about defending their child’s reputation in the age of Internet Bullying and Internet Harassment. ReputationDefender has blogged about the new quandaries parents face in the digital age. From privacy concerns, to internet safety for children, to Cyber Bullying, today’s parents have a lot to deal with online.

ReputationDefender is committed to child online safety and protecting kids on the net. That is why we launched MyChild, a service that monitors the online activity of teens and allows parents to keep up with what their child is doing online. ReputationDefender encourages all parents to speak with their children about proper online behavior. Never give out personal information online and don’t assume that something posted on your own blog or facebook account will remain private.

Parents should be proactive about defending the reputation of their children online. Do not hesitate to contact site moderators, admins or other webmasters to report TOS violations and malicious postings.

ReputationDefender ran into this sage advice from Tales of Mere Existence that relates to online bullying and your child’s reputation.

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By now most people are aware of the Meghan Meier case. For those that are unaware, Lori Drew, 49, of Missouri, allegedly created a fake profile on MySpace for a non-existent boy and then contacted Meghan Meier through MySpace. Supposedly after receiving some mean messages from this fictitious boy Meghan killed herself in the family home.

Because the case occurred over the Internet and MySpace is headquartered out of Beverly Hills, federal authorities have been involved with the matter. Charges have been filed, and prosecutors are arguing that by helping create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn’t exist Drew violated the News Corp.-owned site’s terms of service and thus illegally accessed protected computers.

While it seems to make some sense, the potential ramifications of this logic are a little chilling unto themselves. As the AP article points out:

Legal experts warned Friday that such an interpretation could criminalize routine behavior on the Internet. After all, people regularly create accounts or post information under aliases for many legitimate reasons, including parody, spam avoidance and a desire to maintain their anonymity or privacy online or that of a child.

This new interpretation also gives a business contract the force of a law: Violations of a Web site’s user agreement could now lead to criminal sanction, not just civil lawsuits or ejection from a site.

The prosecution’s legal argument is that in order to access MySpace’s servers Drew had to sign up for MySpace’s service, which entails providing your name and date of birth. Beyond that, one must agree to abide by the site’s terms of service. The terms of service forbid using any false registration information, soliciting personal information from anyone under 18 and using any information gathered from the Web site to “harass, abuse, or harm another person.” Thus, by merely using a fictitious name Drew violated MySpace’s terms and had no authority to access the MySpace service.

The Drews are already on the defensive, and their lawyer has announced a legal challenge to this interpretation. They contend that this reading raises issues of constitutionality related to free speech and due process of law.

It is clear from this and other cases that Cyber Bullying and Bullying Online are real concerns for parents in the digital age. Parents can monitor their teen’s activity online with MyChild from ReputationDefender.

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In response to the suicide death of 13-year-old Meghan Meier, state lawmakers in Missouri have given final approval to a bill making cyber bullying illegal. Meier is at the center of a pending case that transpired when the mother of one of her friends wanted to know if Meghan was saying negative things about her daughter and allegedly created a false profile on MySpace in the name of a non-existent 16-year-old boy. Eventually this fictitious boy, “Josh Evans,” ended his online relationship with Meghan, which is believed to have been the catalyst that led to the young girl taking her life.

The bill, which was recently signed by the Governor, updates existing state laws against harassment to be more relevant with current technological developments. Specifically, the new bill removes the requirement that the communication considered to be harassment be written or over the telephone. Supporters of the move say the updated bill will now cover harassment from electronic devices like computers and text messages.

Many of the provisions contained in the bill arose from a special gubernatorial task force that studied Internet harassment after the details of Megan Meier’s suicide were made public.

The mother who allegedly created the profile, Lori Drew, has been indicted in California on federal counts of conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the teen. As we reported earlier, an attorney for Drew is preparing a legal challenge to the prosecution’s claims.

Police in Missouri did not initially file any charges against Drew largely because there was no applicable state law to prosecute her actions under. While the outcome of the current case is uncertain, Sen. Scott Rupp has stated that the proposed amendments would have allowed prosecutors to continue investigating without having to ship the case to a different state.

“Without a good, quality cyber stalking and harassment law, which we don’t currently have, we have to go to federal courts in other states to make a stretching leap argument,” said Rupp, R-Wentzville.

Other senators have seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, and our coming out with their own interpretations. State Sen. Harry Kennedy, D-St. Louis, said the law is “definitely a warning shot for those folks who want to use the Internet for harassment.”

This is another example of how 20th century case law is unfit to deal with the realities of the digital age. Anti Bullying advocates, parents and concerned netizens, while saddened at this event, can be pleased with the outcome and new state law.

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The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting piece entitled “The Downsides To Blogging About Your Kid,” in which Cybele Weisser discusses the possible pitfalls associated with Cyber Parenting. She runs a blog with public photos of her son. The internet allows friends and family to watch the child grow up.

Sometimes, though, the site also serves as an unfortunate reminder of the Internet’s not-so-innocent side. A few days ago, for instance, I noticed that some of the recent photos we’d posted had an extraordinary number of views, the result of people searching for keywords such as “bedtime, “nursing,” and “pj’s.”

Privacy concerns stemming from the public display of family photos include Cyber Stalking and balancing the protection of children online with wanting to share their development with loved ones. Other points of view brought up in the piece and in the comments include making a website private to keep predatory web surfers out of your digital family life and concerns that this album could prove embarrasing to the child as he matures.

What do you think? Are parenting blogs putting children at risk? Are we over exposing the intimate details about our lives? And when the kids grow up, will they ever live down their baby blog?

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Regular readers of the ReputationDefender Blog will remember this post about Indian Schools posting student records online for employers and universities to see. Now, a recent article from Australia’s venerable Courier Mail highlights another new policy by school officials to publicly post all student files for anyone to see:

The intranet database, dubbed OneSchool, will profile each of the state’s 480,000 public school students enrolled from Prep to Year 12.

Photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are being collected from all 1251 state schools.

Some parents are understandably concerned about this initiative, questioning the rationale behind such a bold new program. They cite concerns about the availability of the information to inappropriate parties such as pedophiles and hackers. One reader commenting on the article suggested that personal information from the politicians who support the measure, along with that of their wives and children, be posted first as a test to determine if it safe before adding school children.

Using more of a stick than a carrot, Education Minister Rod Welford is quoted as saying that parents who refuse to supply information about their children for the database could find their children denied access to public education, and that the program, dubbed OneSchool is “non-negotiable.”

While the centralization of records and databases is a necessary thing in order to facilitate information sharing, it comes with a cost, and the child’s reputation moves online, as well as off. At what point does the availability of information outweigh the security risks inherent in making it more widely available?

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We recently noticed this chilling article from The Ottawa Citizen detailing how one man, using a complex system of multiple aliases and old fashioned trickery, successfully utilized the Internet to sexually exploit and blackmail several girls from around the world.

It seems he had a system whereby he would pose online as a young girl to lure in young women on different sites and earn their trust. Believing he was a female, these girls let down their guards and willingly complied with requests to expose themselves on web-web cams. Once he had these girls sufficiently fooled, he would then begin asking seemingly innocuous questions in order to hack their passwords for social networking sites. From there, he launched his blackmail campaigns, threatening to post the embarrassing web cam photographs and expose the girls to their friends and families.

There’s a very good sort of litmus test highlighted in the article by OPP Det. Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt, the provincial co-ordinator for strategy concerning illegal Internet activities:

“If there are things you would feel uncomfortable doing in your school hallway, why would you do it on the Internet?”

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The recent vandalism of Robert Frost’s Vermont home raised concerns in the community and online.

Dan Barry has an interesting article in the New York Times that chronicles the recent break in and vandalism of a Vermont Farmhouse once owned by American poet Robert Frost. Like so many news stories of late, this piece also involves social networking and teenage online behavior.

According to authorities in Ripton, Vermont, approximately 30 teenagers broke into the historic house and caused over $10,000 worth of damages.

As Barry notes:

“Mix 30 or more young people with 150 cans of beer, a few bottles of liquor and some drugs, put them in a museumlike, unheated house in the dead of winter, and the ensuing discussions will not center on [Frost’s poetry]. Some played drinking games, some got sick, some did damage, and all followed that snowy path out, bound together by a secret that could not keep.”

Eventually the damage was discovered, along with the identities of the students involved. Middlebury College, which owns the property, dispatched a crew to mend walls and restore the house to its original condition. Several youths, apparently unversed in country things, have been charged with unlawful trespassing and unlawful mischief.

Police and community leaders are shocked at the indifference and destruction wrought by the students. One teen went so far as to request a copy of his mug shot to use on his Facebook profile, which brings clarity to that indifference in the online world. Parents should talk to their children about responsible actions in the real world, but as this and other stories show, it is increasingly important for parents to educate their kids about acting responsibly online.

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We noticed this interesting article from The New York Times this week. What struck us as a very noteworthy quote was the sentiment of one of the parents profiled:

“It’s really hard to control what our kids are doing online,” says Anne Collier, a writer who provides online safety information for parents. “What we have here is really kind of the new Wild West. Nobody is really in charge.”

This frustration is very prevalent among parents we speak with these days. The dramatic up-tick in the number of social networking sites on the Internet, in conjunction with how these sites can be abused, has led to a great deal of confusion. What separates a benign past time for the average 13 year old from a potentially very dangerous activity? The simplest way to protect children online requires that parents become educated on this topic and then monitor the activity of their children. When a child knows that there is oversight in their digital realm they will be less likely to engage in risky behaviors within that sphere. Microsoft has a pretty good site that helps parents educate themselves on how to protect their children online, particularly if you happen to be a Windows user.

Furthermore, parents can opt to take a truly pro-active stance and doing research of their own.

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