Sharing pictures, messages and personal information to communicate with “friends” sounds harmless right? Wrong, those who have a profile such as MySpace, hi5, MiGente, Tag or Facebook don’t know who they’re really talking to. By putting up personal information and pictures on these webpages, young teenagers and kids starting from ages 11 and up are putting their life in danger without knowing it.

For this article, 100 students were surveyed from Carl Schurz High School on the webpages they visit when they use the internet and if they communicate with personal friends or strangers. Statistics showed that 69 out of 100 students surveyed visit MySpace, from ages 14-18. That’s more than half of the students surveyed! The rest of the 31 students surveyed answered to different web pages like Yahoo mail, MSN and the ones listed above. Out of these 69 students, 66 of them claim to communicate with friends only and 3 admitted to communicating with strangers as well as friends.

The real question is how many of these students actually know the person they’re really talking to? There have been many cases reported on the news about teens associated with MySpace that have been missing because they tend to meet with people they meet on these pages. Here is an example,

A 14 year old girl who was apparently assaulted by a 19 year old guy whom she met online through the popular blog site MySpace.com is now filing a lawsuit against the corporation for $30 million saying MySpace's failure to verify users' ages on their site led to her being sexually assaulted. (http://franklid.blogspot.com/2006/06/girl-gets-raped-says-its-myspaces.html)

This girl on the article shared her mobile phone number with the 19 year old guy to arrange a date. She claims to have been molested by this 19 year old sexual assaulter, and it is believed that all this is due to MySpace. I believe it’s all about common sense and that the girl should have known better than to give out her mobile number. True, but young teenagers go on to these sites wanting to meet new people; of course, this is not the best method. This is why when students use CPS computers, MySpace is blocked from the system for the safety of teens that like to be online.

Instead of going home and sitting behind that computer desk staring at the “home” page on MySpace for hours, teens can instead do something productive. Read a book, find a hobby, or exercise! If there is no alternative to something other than using the computer, then everytime you log on to your profile stop and think if you really know who the person sitting on the other end of that monitor is. It’s that simple. Watch who you communicate with; don’t speak to strangers. This would help reduce the disappearances of many teens because of these websites; you don’t want to be another victim.