Does Bebo’s Chief Safety Officer know how social network signup works?
The front page of yesterdays Irish Times carried a story about an international expert on online paedophile activity who is suggesting that the Government should provide email addresses to every pupil in Irish schools to help verify their age when signing up to internet communities.
The international expert who suggested this is one Dr Rachel O’Connell, Bebo’s Chief Safety Officer. It is amazing that someone holding such an important position in one of the companies hosting these online communities would propose such a technically deficient policy. Users of social websites can sign up using any email address they own, not just one that a government might allocate.
The technical managers at Bebo would do well to vet these statements in future. They reflect very badly on the percieved competence of the company’s management team as a whole.
The point here is proving that they belong to the school they claim to belong to. If each school has a different email domain we can associate that domain with a school, only pupils of the school would be able to verify the email address which would be a criteria of joining. We do this for university students with great success.
Hi Michael,
Given that the pupil communities in each Irish school seem to have a very active Bebo presence I find it hard to believe that anyone could currently pretend to be attending a school without one of a (many) real pupils from that school noticing.
Adding an email domain check to account registration is therefore really of little or no benefit. It does nothing to address the problem of predators anonymously reading the considerable volumes of personal information that young people routinely disclose about themselves on their pages. It also does nothing to deter predators who build a presence within Bebo by creating accounts that do not specify an association with any educational institution since doing so is entirely optional.
Kids will accidentally or purposely extend their network beyond their school(s) and they will also publish too much information about themselves. I’m not suggesting it is Bebo’s responsibility to actively monitor all minors that use your systems. Ultimately, I believe it is their parents responsibility to monitor their kids usage but that just does not seem to happen, perhaps due to technical illiteracy.
My point is that Bebo’s Chief Safety Officer should not be suggesting that a simple email domain verification check will resolve this problem. Doing so misleads parents into assuming that their kids would then be safe to use social networks unsupervised.