In today’s high tech world of the Internet you need to take special care to protect then not only from local dangers but those that may come from outside your community.  My children have been taught from a young age never to post their real name, photo’s, or other identifying information on over the Internet without my permission.  I thought this would be sufficient until I realized other parents might not take the same precautions.

Out of curiosity one day I took the time to sit down with my daughter and have her show me the sites she visits and uses to meet and share ideas with her friends.  I was shocked to find out that all her friends had profiles on MySpace.  I didn’t think in the small rural town of Decatur, IN it would be that popular among the teenage kids.  The fact that the kids were using these pages wasn’t nearly as shocking as what I found on their sites.  Most of the pages included kids real names, photo’s and basically their entire history throughout their chats.  My daughter didn’t quite understand why this upset me so until I pointed out several things about her I could derive from the sites. Here is some of the common information I found about her and her friend by just viewing their sites and reading their chat.

• Just about every teenager’s full name was listed either in a chat post or directly on the site.      
• Reading the chats I could just about tell you where every one of the kids went to school, worked, or just hung out on the weekend.      
• Most of them even times where they would be at or leaving one of these places.     
• I could tell you what make model and color of car most of them drove.     
• Some were so bold as to list their home addresses.     
• Just about every one of them had a photo showing them and their friend, most pointing out names of each person in the photo.      
• The scariest thing I found was the over half of them were using public profiles allowing anyone to view and comment on their site. 

Some of you may think, so what? Their kids let them have their fun. For those of you that think this way, do you realize that this information is a child predator’s dream come true?  I don’t know about other areas, but in Decatur, In there are 18 registered sex offenders. Why would you let your children expose themselves to such dangers? Please be responsible and monitor how your children are using the Internet.