MySpace recently came under fire from parents, teachers and law enforcement after several cases in which men molested underage girls met through it.

Credit: AFP

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PARIS: Fears that teenagers using the social networking website MySpace are exposing themselves to danger by disclosing personal details are overblown, researchers say.

MySpace is the most popular social networking site and most popular website in the United States, as well as the fourth most popular English-language website in the world, according to figures cited by the U.S. researchers.

Criminologist Sameer Hinduja of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and Justin Patchin, a political science researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, randomly selected 9,282 profiles out of the 100 million purportedly available on MySpace.

Sexual predators

Of the 2,423 profiles created by individuals aged under 18, 948 were set to "private," meaning that they could only be viewed by friends.

Of the remaining 1,475, one person in 12 revealed their full name, 57 percent included a picture, 27.8 per cent listed their school, 81 per cent identified their city and 0.3 per cent provided their phone number. Four per cent included an instant messaging name, and one per cent an email address.

Hinduja and Patchin, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescence, say that sexual predators can glean important personal snippets from these "shop window" postings. But, overall, the situation is not as alarming as critics of MySpace have suggested, they say.

"When considered in its proper context, these results indicate that the problem of personal information disclosure on MySpace may not be as widespread as many assume, and that the overwhelming majority of adolescents are responsibly using the website," they say.

Too much information

The site came under fire from parents, teachers and law enforcement after several cases in which men molested underage girls met through MySpace. In response, MySpace launched a campaign to promote online safety and hired a chief security officer.

Hinduja and Patchin warn that youngsters may be setting themselves up for problems if they post details about alcohol or drug use or other personal details on their profiles. Such data can be seen by bullies, their parents, their school and the police – as well as by potential employers, who increasingly trawl through such sites as part of a background check.

Deleting or updating incriminating profiles does not wipe out copies of older versions, which Google, Microsoft Live and other search engines store on cache memories in their computer servers.

The paper also places a question mark as to how many people actually use MySpace and how often they use it.

Number of users

The authors note that of the 9,282 profiles they randomly selected 548 – six percent – had been deleted, were no longer active or were otherwise invalid. Another 278 profiles, or three per cent, had been posted by musicians promoting their work.

Of the 1,475 accessible profiles posted by those under 18 years old, around 30 per cent of the teenagers had not logged in to view their profile in over three months, and about five per cent of these had not done so in more than a year.

"This finding... calls into question the claim of 100,000,000 MySpace users," say Hinduja and Patchin. "Results from our study suggest the number of regular or active users to be significantly less."

They also contend that eight percent of the publicly posted teen profiles showed evidence that the youngster had deliberately inflated his or her age.

This was presumably done to circumvent MySpace's age policy, it says.

MySpace requires users to be at least 14 years of age, and the profiles of those representing themselves as 14 or 15 are automatically set to "private" view only.