Pair helps parents deal with boom in internet sites: BeNetSafe.com gives reports on public profiles.

Social networking sites are big business.

Rupert Murdoch paid more than $500 million for MySpace. Yahoo! is reportedly in talks to purchase Facebook for up to $1 billion. Microsoft recently launched a test version of its own social networking site called Wallop.

There are millions of users to these sites. And there are just as many ways for those users to have their information used improperly and potentially placing themselves into dangerous or exploitative situations.

That's why tech entrepreneurs Michael Edelson and Brad Weber developed BeNetSafe.com, a web-based service to alert parents what their children are writing on their public profiles.

Before one thinks that Weber and Edelson are fuddy duddies wanting to stop kids from communicating with their friends, between the two of them they have six teenage children all with MySpace pages.

"There is no inherent danger from the Internet or social networking," Weber said. "This is a tool for parents to find information that shouldn't be out there."

The pair's service--based out of offices in Sherman Oaks--launched in August and so far has about 1,000 subscribers. Subscriptions can be monthly or annual and are simple to set up. With a minimal amount of information--a child's name and e-mail address--parents can receive a daily, weekly or monthly report of what their children write at their sites.

Edelson cautioned that their service is not spyware recording keystrokes but a collector of information available in the public domain.

As they learned through personal experience, it can take hours for parents to monitor their children's activities on the Internet. Even if the computers at home are blocked or filtered, teens are savvy enough to get around those restrictions.

"Ninety percent of all kids have access to a second computer other than at home," Edelson said.

A goal of the BeNetSafe service is to educate social networking site users to be responsible about what they write.

Teenagers have the mindset that when they make a MySpace page it will only be seen by themselves and their friends when it can be seen to any person who goes to the site, Weber site.

Edelson and Weber have worked together since the 1980s and launched BeNetSafe through a combination of their own money and outside investors who put money into startup companies.

The pair is looking for a second round of outside funding, set up an affiliate program that pays commissions to other websites sending traffic to BeNetSafe and are partnering with other companies to offer BeNetSafe as part of a bundled package with other security services.