SafeKids.com » attorneys general

Predator Panic a risky distraction

larrymagid — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:19:01 +0000

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.

At issue is the constant drumbeat of predator panic coming from state attorneys general, including Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who are co-chairs of the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, which represents attorneys general from 49 states. Although their rhetoric is purported to help protect young people from harm, the actual impact of their campaign to rid social networks of predators may be inadvertently putting young people at greater risk.

In addition to shifting attention away from more common online dangers, they have proposed the use of age-verification and parental controls which could actually increase risk by driving teens “underground,” possibly to overseas sites that are far more dangerous than sites like MySpace and Facebook.

What’s more, all the hoopla is disrupting the work of several of the most respected non-profit Internet safety organizations which, ironically, have to spend resources countering this misleading information at the cost of focusing on how to help young people use the Internet more safely.

A bit of background

For more than two years, these and other elected officials have been talking about predator dangers on MySpace and other social networking sites and calling for the use of age-verification technology to help separate minors from adults. A year ago, the working group of attorneys general entered an agreement with MySpace to form a task force to study the issue.

After months of careful consideration, including a review of all research, the task force came back with a report that questioned the prevalence of predator danger and also questioned both the desirability and effectiveness of using any single technology to verity the age of users. Instead of carefully considering the report, it was rejected out of hand.

The justice officers’ reaction to the report was best summed up by Blumenthal, who recently said it was, “based on outdated and incomplete data – falsely downplaying the threat of predators on social networking sites.”

I have a great deal of respect for much of the work that Blumenthal, Cooper and other attorneys general do for public safety and to protect consumers, but when it comes to Internet safety, they continue to rely on anecdotal evidence rather than available peer-reviewed academic research (PDF).

Disclosure: I served on the task force as co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several Internet and social networking companies including MySpace and Facebook. I also served as a member of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force and am the founder of SafeKids.com.

Now there’s a new argument based on the disclosure last week that MySpace has evicted 90,000 registered sex offenders from its roles. In a press release, Blumenthal said, “This shocking revelation – resulting from our subpoena – provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators.”

But what Blumenthal failed to point out is that 90,000 is not the number of currently or recently evicted registered sex offenders (RSOs) on MySpace, but a cumulative number based on all the RSO’s MySpace has ejected since two years ago when it adopted technology to identify and remove them from its roles.

Facebook, too

In the meantime, Facebook has been under attack for its own reported predator problem. Tech Crunch ran a story last week with the headline “Thousands Of MySpace Sex Offender Refugees Found On Facebook.” It reportedly got the information from John Cardillo, CEO of Sentinel, the security company that helps MySpace and other social networking sites identify registered sex offenders so they can be removed.

Facebook is not one of Sentinel’s customers, but says that it employs other methods to attempt to identify registered sex offenders and others who might endanger its members. This includes relying on Facebook members and working directly with state databases and state attorneys general, according to Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

But, the attorneys general who are screaming about predators don’t seem to have information about specific individuals harming children. Facebook, according to Schnitt, “is not aware of a single case where a registered sex offender has contacted a minor through Facebook.”

The same is true on MySpace. According to MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam, “not one of the deleted MySpace offenders has ever been prosecuted for criminal misconduct with a teen on MySpace.”

Based on surveys with teens, I suspect that this is largely because the vast majority of teens are savvy enough to avoid these creeps. As you would expect, officials from both Facebook and MySpace say that they are doing all they can to rid their sites of registered sex offenders.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll be 100% successful. Short of shutting down their services, I can’t think of anything that can be done to completely eliminate even registered sex offenders, let alone the much larger number of offenders who haven’t been caught and convicted.

They’re everywhere

At the risk of contributing to the paranoia, it’s important to point out sex offenders are also in the real world. Unless we decide to keep them in jail forever, they are going to be among us. They go to malls, they shop at grocery stores, they live in neighborhoods and many have jobs. I know for a fact that there are registered sex offenders living within walking distance from my house and I have no doubt that my children have encountered them in the real world.

And then there are the ones who haven’t been caught. It’s a known fact that some of them teach in our schools, patrol our streets, preach in our places of worship, work in our hospitals and clinics, and coach our kids.

What’s worse, family members, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, account for “a quarter to a third of offenders.” Strangers make up the smallest group with estimates ranging between 7 and 25 percent.

Strangers who meet their victims on the Internet represent an extremely small percentage of all cases, especially compared to family members. It’s analogous to worrying about being killed in a plane crash instead of focusing on driving safely. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is one of several safety organizations that no longer condone the use of the phrase “stranger danger.”

As I’ve pointed out in previous articles, researchers who study sexual assault cases have found very few actual cases of children being sexually molested as a result of a contact they made on the Internet. It happens, but it happens in far fewer numbers than other forms of sexual abuse. And when it does happen, it is almost always a case of a teenager who is taking extraordinary risks online, including – in most cases – engaging in sexual conversation with a person known to be an adult.

I’m not saying this to place blame on the victims or excuse illegal behavior of some adults, but rather to point out that how young people behave online affects their risk.

It’s time that all of us – politicians too – start looking for real solutions and talking with real experts, not just relying on anecdotal data and provocative sound bites.

For more perspective, check out CNET News’ Caroline McArthy’s post on this subject.

Net safety task force says predation risk exagerated

larrymagid — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:33:06 +0000

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.

Over the past couple of years, several state AGs have been looking into potential dangers to youth, and some have called for social-network sites to use age verification technology to confirm the ages of users in an attempt to prevent adults from or interacting online with minors. The task force includes representatives of Internet and social-networking companies, security and identity authentication vendors, and nonprofit advocacy organizations. It’s chaired by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Disclosure: I served as a member of the task force, representing ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit internet safety organization I co-founded along with Anne Collier. ConnectSafely receives financial support from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet and social-networking companies. I am also founder of SafeKids.com and am on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is represented on the task force.

Based on data analyzed by its Research Advisory Board, the task force concluded that “actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine” and that “the image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated offline encounters.”

While the task force found that youth risk from predators is a concern, the overwhelming majority of youth are not in danger of being harmed by an adult predator they meet online. To the extent that young people have received an unwanted online sexual solicitation, data from a 2000 study and a 2006 follow-up from the Crimes Against Children Research Center concludes that “youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48 percent in 2000; 43 percent in 2006) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20 percent; 30 percent), with few (4 percent; 9 percent) coming from older adults, and the remaining being of unknown age.”

What the task force did find is that “bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most salient threats that minors face, both online and offline.” Partially because researchers can’t agree on a definition of bullying and harassment, the actual risk is hard to quantify, but it is clearly much higher than the risk of being harmed by a predator. Some studies suggest that as many as 49 percent of youth have experienced some type of bullying or harassment. In many cases no serious emotional or physical harm occurred. However, a study by Michelle Ybarra and Janice Wolak found that “39 percent of victims reported emotional distress over being harassed online.”

There is also a widespread belief that deception is often involved where adults pose as teens to engage with young people, but research shows that that’s rarely the case. The report found that “although identity deception may occur online, it does not appear to play a large role in criminal cases in which adult sex offenders have been arrested for sex crimes in which they met victims online.” Interviews with police show that “most victims are underage adolescents who know they are going to meet adults for sexual encounters.” This does not imply that such relationships are healthy or safe, nor that we should blame the victims or tolerate the actions of adults who engage in sex with minors. But it does suggest that child safety advocates need to take a more proactive role in helping teens understand the risk of seeking engaging in relationships with adults.

Importantly, the task force found that online risks “are not radically different in nature or scope than the risks minors have long faced offline, and minors who are most at risk in the offline world continue to be most at risk online.” For example, “a poor home environment full of conflict and poor parent-child relationships is correlated with a host of online risks.”

The attorneys general who called for the task force were anxious for us to study the efficacy of using age verification to help limit inappropriate contact between adults and children online. To help in that job, the task force formed a technical advisory board (TAB) composed of technology experts from Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts, University of Utah, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Bank of America. This board looked at a wide range of technologies including age verification and identity authentication, filtering and auditing, text analysis, and biometrics.

What the TAB found was that age verification technology can be used to identify adults and therefore help prevent minors from engaging in adult-only activities such as accessing adult content or purchasing alcohol or tobacco. There were several technologies submitted by companies that could identify adults based on accessible records such as credit reports, criminal history, and real estate transactions, but these relatively automated systems cannot reliably identify or verify the age of minors because, as the TAB concluded, “public records of minors range from quite limited to nonexistent.” Documentation about young people such as birth certificates, passports, and school records are restricted by federal law for some very good privacy and security reasons.

Age verification options presented by some companies would allow parents to request that their child’s school verify his or her identity and age, but these proposals have their own critics including those who worry about the cost, the possibility of privacy or security leaks, and the financial model presented in some cases that includes providing marketers with information about kids.

The TAB also looked at “peer-based” verification schemes that “allow peers in a community to vote, recommend, or rate whether a person is in an appropriate age group based on relationships and personal knowledge established offline” but worried that with these methods “users can vote as many times as they wish to artificially raise or lower a peer rating.” There were concerns that “minors might organize against another minor in their ratings or recommendations in an online form of bullying.”

At one task force meeting, a company presented technology that tries to distinguish between an adult and a child by analyzing the bone density of the person’s hand. Another tool attempts to identify an individual through facial recognition to match that person against a database of registered sex offenders.

Although the TAB expressed “cautious optimism” about the possibility of using technology to protect kids, it concluded that “every technology has its problems” and that “no single technology reviewed could solve every aspect of online safety for minors, or even one aspect of it one hundred percent of the time.” The bottom line was that “technology can play a role but cannot be the sole input to improved safety for minors online” and that “the most effective technology solution is likely to be a combination of technologies.”

But even if these technologies can be employed effectively, there remains the question of whether they are necessary or helpful. Using technology to separate kids from grown-ups doesn’t address the fact that kids are far more at risk from other kids than from adult predators.

Another danger is that age verification or new rules could be used to keep kids off of social networks or require parental consent. But before issuing rules about this, authorities should explore possible unintended consequences such as isolating kids, causing them to go underground, failing to serve kids from dysfunctional families, and preventing kids from accessing vital services such as the Suicide Prevention Hotline or one of the many online self-help groups.

The task force report will have its critics, including possibly some attorneys general and others who feel that it underestimates the risk of online predators. Indeed, sting operations from law enforcement (as well as the TV show To Catch a Predator) demonstrate that there are plenty of adults who, if given the chance, would engage in sex with youth they meet online. But, based on the research presented to the task force, it appears that the vast majority of young people are savvy enough to avoid such encounters.

Still, there remains a minority of youth who–for a variety of psychological and social reasons–are vulnerable both online and offline. More research needs to be done to identify these young people and provide them with resources and protective services. The fact that most kids are safe is reassuring but it’s not sufficient. If even one child is in danger, then there is work to be done, and that is one thing everyone who cares about this issue can agree on.