Lawyers, advocates look to protect kids from Web networking dangers.

Millions of U.S. teens have embraced a new craze--"social networking" on Web sites, where they can sign up and read blogs and messages, see photos and videos, and have virtual conversations with others in real time. Minors at the school dance have chaperones, but who's watching them online?

"The new form of social interaction is over the Internet, exposing children to, literally, a world of potential danger," said Michelle Collins, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), in testimony in July before a House subcommittee considering the Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA). "Child predators consider [social networking] sites to be an easyway to find child victims. They can use the information posted by children to forge a 'cyber-relationship' that can lead to that child being victimized."

Reports to the center's CyberTipline about online enticement of children have increased 400 percent since 1998, Collins said. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), one in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet.

Social networking sites--like Classmates.com; Friendster; Xanga; and the largest, MySpace, with more than 100 million users--allow people to sign up (usually for free) and create profiles with pictures, videos, and personal information to find others who share similar interests. People identified as "friends" can post comments and link their pages to other "friends." The sites maybe open to anyone or limited to specific groups (such as students in Great Britain or retirees); some maybe joined by invitation only. Some sites charge a membership fee to enter.

To "join" most sites, users simply supply a name, date of birth, and e-mail address. Though site user agreements may ban members under a certain age and ithreaten to oust those who use offensive language or post obscene images, site owners claim they can do little to rein in such uses.

Teens are flocking to these sites. A survey of 1,160 youths ages 13 to 17 released in May by cable TV and Internet provider Cox Communications found 61 percent of the teens had a personal profile on a social networking site, 14 percent had met face-to-face with someone they knew only through the Internet (30 percent had considered meeting someone), and 45 percent had been asked for personal information by someone they didn't know. One in five believed it was safe to share personal information on a public blog or networking site. One-third said their parents knew very little about what they do online.

The debate is well under way over who is responsible when a child is victimized by someone he or she met on a networking Web site, but the issue is just beginning to reach the courts. In what is believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind, a Texas woman and her daughter have sued MySpace, claiming the daughter was raped by a man she met on the site.

The girl, known as Julie Doe in the suit, set up a profile on MySpace in 2005, when she was 13. The complaint emphasizes that the girl was 14 when she began regularly using her MySpace profile, but it does not state how old she claimed to be.

After being contacted by a man who said he was a 19-year-old college football player and exchanging information online, Julie gave him her cell phone number. She eventually met him for dinner and a movie, after which they drove in his car to the parking lot of an apartment complex, where, the complaint alleges, he sexually assaulted her.

The man, a community college student named Pete Solis, admitted to having sex with the girl but said he thought she was older. He faces a second-degree felony assault charge. Julie and her mother filed suit against MySpace; its parent company, News Corp.; and Solis. (Doe v. MySpace, Inc., No. D-1-6N-06-002209 (Tex., Travis Co. Dist. June 19, 2006) .)

"The suit alleges that MySpace.com had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the Web site but did nothing to stop it," according to news posted on the Web site maintained by Austin, Texas, attorney Adam Loewy, who represents the plaintiffs. They also allege that MySpace "fraudulently represents it has security measures in place to protect its young members, but in reality, it does not.

The complaint makes claims against MySpace and News Corp. for negligence, gross negligence, fraud, and negligent misrepresentation--and against Solis for sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The plaintiffs seek damages for present and future medical and psychological care, pecuniary loss, mental anguish, psychological trauma, pain and suffering, and emotional distress.

According to the complaint, MySpace owed the plaintiffs "a legal duty to institute and enforce appropriate security measures and policies that would substantially decrease the likelihood of danger and harm that MySpace posed to [Julie Doe]." It says MySpace represented that the site was safe for underage users but knew it had no effective security measures in place to prevent children from being contacted by dangerous adults. It claims that the site owners knew of numerous attempted sexual assaults of minors by adults "who used MySpace to initiate contact with them and draw them out."

MySpace knew its voluntary and partial disclosures were misleading and untrue and that they created a false impression, the complaint alleges.

MySpace members register for free by entering their name, e-mail address, zip code, gender, and date of birth; clicking a box to indicate that they agree to the site's terms of use; and hitting "Sign Up." The pages of users who truthfully identify themselves as 14 or 15 are private, viewable only by those on the user's "friends" list.

MySpace has made no public comment on the Doe lawsuit, but its home page offers "Safety Tips," which remind users that their profiles are public and recommend against posting anything they would not want the world to know. The tips include "People aren't always who they say they are. Be careful about adding strangers to your friends list," and "Don't mislead people into thinking that you're older or younger." The lengthy terms-of-use agreement cautions, "MySpace.com is not responsible for the conduct, whether online or offline, of any user of the MySpace services."

Attorney Stephen Rubino of Margate, New Jersey, who chairs ATLA's Child Sex Abuse Litigation Group, said a suit like Julie Doe's faces significant legal hurdles.

"Like any other Web service, users have got to agree to an extensive variety of conditions in order to participate--and one of them, I'm sure, is telling the truth," Rubino said. A case like the MySpace suit "is really driven by notice, not by omission. The question becomes, What is the standard of care in the industry? MySpace lets everyone know anyone can register. You can't say that it doesn't."

Some attorneys argue that a site that seeks teenage users and allegedly knows of assault problems against children online has a duty to protect them because there's a foreseeable risk of harm. Others disagree, including John Ottaviani of Providence, Rhode Island, who handles intellectual property cases involving contracts for hardware, software, and electronic commerce.

"No one has ever established that there's a duty of care. It's very difficult for a court to impose one," Ottaviani said. "On everyWeb site, you'd have the duty to protect unknown people who log onto the site--and protect [them] in the physical world, too."

He noted that [section] 230 of the Communications DecencyAct could shield social networking sites from liability. "It says Internet service providers--and that probably extends to any Web site--are not responsible for content provided by a third party," he said. "So if someone else is making comments on a site, the site owner shouldn't be liable for them. It's been applied to defamation, invasion-of-privacy, and some other cases."

On the other hand, Ottaviani noted that the section may not apply. "The complaint isn't alleging that MySpace said something, but that it knew these things happen and didn't do more to stop it. It was the site's own misrepresentation and not words someone else said."

But, he asked, "is causation sufficient? There is a difference between what MySpace did and a third-party attack in the physical world. The site is providing a service, but is it providing a service for somebody who's not intended to have it? Can it be made to do any more? Whether the courts or somebody else should decide is still a question."

After reports of online predators using social networking sites captured the attention of state attorneys general, MySpace hired a former Justice Department prosecutor as its new security officer and instituted new procedures limiting access to younger users. For instance, those 18 and older can no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's friends list unless the adult knows the person's e-mail address or full name. In July, MySpace began running ads on television and the Internet with actor Kiefer Sutherland promoting Internet safety.

Pressure to protect

Several state attorneys general--in-cluding those in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas--have been pressuring social networking sites to address the problem of online predators by instituting age and identity verification procedures. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal wants the minimum age of MySpace users to be 16 (when many teenagers are licensed to drive and added to state databases).

"I have helped lead a task force of 21 attorneys general to repeatedly urge that MySpace introduce age verification and increase its minimum age," Blumenthal wrote in a letter to MySpace in March. "This site should also heed repeated requests for additional safety steps, such as bold, conspicuous notice and a clear link on every page to free blocking software so parents can halt access to MySpace."

Technology fixes are fallible. "There are a variety of levels of protection provided by many sites to keep individuals from finding information," said John Shehan, program manager for NCMEC's CyberTipline. "Still, there are many other sites with no levels in place at all. It would be phenomenal if there was a best-practice agreement between all the providers out there."

Sites could verify data by checking addresses, birth dates, and other information users provide when they register against public databases of voter registration rolls, property ownership records, or driver's licenses. However, most teenagers do not appear on these public lists, and some records are protected by law from disclosure.

"There are a number of different companies developing solutions, but to date none has a solution that would work," Shehan said. "With age-verification technology, just like technical solutions like filtering programs or blocking programs, there are ways around it.

"Prevention requires an equal balance between industry, parents and education, and law enforcement," he added. "There are proactive forces now. We work closely with [regional task forces]--they're the tech-using gurus who investigate high-tech crimes. And they are in the social networking realms checking it out. And it's not just the chat rooms, the MySpaces, the Xangas--there are a lot of sites where people can interact."

Federal laws governing online communications, such as the Communications Decency Act, may pertain to Web sites and child sex abuse, but more specific bills are turning up. DOPA (H.R. 5319), extending the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000, passed the House in July and was before a Senate committee at press time. It would require public schools and libraries that receive federal funding to "protect minors from commercial social networking Web sites and chat rooms."

Examples of sites listed in DOPA include MySpace, Friendster, and LiveJournal, but the exact definition of a social networking site will be determined by the Federal Communications Commission. DOPA's categorization has been criticized for being too broad and potentially including most commercial interactive sites.

In February, the federal government launched Project Safe Childhood--a coordinated effort between state, local, and federal law enforcement and nonprofit organizations to investigate and prosecute crimes against children committed through the Internet or other electronic media. It will work with Internet Crimes Against Children, a national network of 46 regional task forces, to help fund and train law enforcement.

Another facet of Project Safe Childhood involves community awareness and education programs.

"Parents need to talk to their children about information that they're posting online--and they need to talk to their children's friends, because many sites allow friends of children to link to their profiles," said the NCMEC's Shehan.

Parents are increasingly monitoring their children's Internet use. A September 2005 Pew/Internet and American Life Project survey reported 54 percent of parents of online teens have installed filters on their computers, and parents are also making rules about computer use and keeping computers in a public place in the home.

The Cox survey found 36 percent of teens said parents had talked a lot about online safety, and those teens said they ignore messages from unknown people, don't reply or chat with them, report the messages to adults, or block unknown senders.

Collins testified to the House that at a July NCMEC conference, "We learned that more restrictions will cause teens to go somewhere else that has fewer restrictions, with the unintended consequence of increasing their chances of being victimized. We learned that the current age-verification technology is ineffective for children too young to appear in public records databases. We learned the increased importance of education messages, and engaging teens to become a part of their own online safety."