Child Safety Online

In a former life, my everyday life was battling against the commercial sexual exploitation of children, then of combatting the trafficking of children. But in the last three years, I’ve managed to steer clear of this advocacies save for the very seasonal activities I still join. When I saw the story on MSN.com, some of the sparks were rekindled in me. I’m referring to efforts to rid MySpace and Facebook of registered sex offenders. That’s all well and good, but I think they can only do that for sex offenders who have been convicted in the United States. MySpace and Facebook have worldwide following, how would they address the possibility that there may be child sexual predators online who come from other countries too? It’s a good start anyway, and it really should be up to owners of the social networking sites to institute safeguards for kids.

One thing’s for sure though, it is easier to safeguard kids online when there are laws like the COPPA for the US, and the one for Korea too. Because it obligates web sites to have a strict privacy policy for the information of minors.