MySpace is looking for ways to check age online

Social sites like MySpace have an increasing place in the lives of teenagers. On these sites not only friendship and love is born, but also crimes of the law. Most often this is a sexually motivated crime involving minors. It got to the point that law enforcement agencies directly turned to social networks on the Internet with instructions to improve the measures for checking age and identifying users. But how to do it online?



So far, no one has actually found a technology that could identify the user's age on the Internet, writes Wired. For example, MySpace held a number of consultations with technology companies, but they could not offer an effective solution. News Corp. Representative (MySpace owners) last month reported on this even to the US Congress. There is no real solution.



Experts even doubt that this problem can be solved technologically at all. So, the MySpace director of security says that a technical solution should be combined with an educational solution, as well as cooperation with law enforcement.

')

Among the more than 94 million registered MySpace users, approximately one in five is under the age of 18. A month ago, the mother of a 14-year-old girl told the police that a 19-year-old football player had molested her via the Internet. She sued MySpace, demanding compensation of $ 30 million.



Recently, a number of technical measures have been implemented on MySpace to protect minors. For example, now for contact with a user of 14-15 years, you must first know his email address or full name.



However, the indication of your own age is still a matter of purely voluntary. None of the technical age verification tools are suitable for MySpace. Such tools include credit card verification, as well as more intelligent identity verification systems from IDology and Sentinel Tech Holding's Sentry , which compare entered addresses, dates of birth and other information with data from other databases (voters database, property owners database, credit base etc.). Both of these methods are designed to identify adults, but there are teenagers among users of social sites. They did not take part in the elections, did not have real estate and did not take loans. Most of them do not even have a driver's license up to 16 years.



That driver's license can be the most realistic way to check the age of an American. Therefore, some politicians urge social sites to raise the minimum age from 14 to 16 years. Then the problem would be solved.



Another possible solution to the problem is the creation of social networks for children. For example, the Imbee social network is designed for children 8-14 years old, and you can only register in it with the help of parents who enter their credit card number and pay for services. The creators of the similar service “Room of Zoo” for girls 10-14 years old themselves verified the identities of each of the 300 girls registered in the service. But this, of course, is not an option.



Perhaps, in the future, artificial intelligence technologies will be created that can automatically collect private information about the user on the Internet. For example, study texts and photos in his diary and conversation topics in a chat to calculate a person’s age. However, the emergence of such tools will certainly cause protests from human rights activists. One way or another, but the problem of determining the age online will have to be solved.