The Trust Foundation Understanding trust issues in the digital era.

“In 2006, a fake profile led to the suicide of a 13-year-old Missouri girl. A classmate’s mother originally created the profile to find out if Megan Meier was saying anything bad about her daughter. But then it was used to gain Meier’s confidence and then to tear her down. Angry messages went back and forth, and it ended with Meier hanging herself.

There’s also the need to prevent pedophiles from contacting children online. MySpace has agreed with different states’ attorney generals to adopt better technologies that will help identify underage users so they can be protected from predators, but the social networking site hasn’t figured out how it’s going to do it.

The vast majority of sites don’t do anything to try to confirm the identities of members. The sites also don’t want to absorb the cost of trying to prove the identity of their members. Also, identifying minors is almost impossible because there isn’t enough information out there to authenticate their identity.”

The increasing number of social networking sites has raised a new concern in the digital world. These social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and professional networking site LinkedIn, have done very little to verify the identities of the users who have signed up. Lack of proper control being put in place has caused parents to worry as their children spend more time online interacting at these social networking sites. Find out more about it here.