In an agreement entered into by MySpace and the attorneys general
from 49 states this past Monday, MySpace agreed to providing better
management of what underage users are allowed to do on the popular
social networking site.
Brian Milburn, founder and CEO of Solid Oak Software, thinks the
whole agreement is "smoke and mirrors." Solid Oak has published
CYBERsitter, a well known and popular Internet filtering program, for
13 years. "We have been involved in Internet content management for
kids since the Internet as we know it began," says Milburn.
In November of 2007, Solid Oak released version 10 of their
CYBERsitter software and introduced its new V-Token technology. This
patent-pending technology basically sends a small digital token
containing age-identification information to the web site whenever a
user connects. This allows web content providers to adjust their
content offerings based on the token they have received from the
visitor. According to Milburn, all CYBERsitter version 10 users are
already sending this token to MySpace and all other web sites users
visit if the logged in user is age restricted.
"We attempted to contact MySpace and several other social
networking providers to let them know about our new technology without
success," says Milburn. "They simply were not interested. There are
currently thousands of CYBERsitter users who have upgraded to version
10 and are already sending age-restricted tokens to MySpace. MySpace
could implement support for this today if they wanted to," he adds. "I
can only conclude that this new agreement is simply lip service to
make the controversy go away."
Milburn believes, as so many others do, that universal age
verification is virtually impossible. He believes that a solution must
begin with MySpace and other content providers to honor the wishes of
parents and other adults responsible for children´s supervision. "We
know for a fact that parents want to participate in making the
Internet a safe place for their kids. MySpace is ignoring the first
and best line of defense -- the parent," says Milburn. "If MySpace
won´t work with parents to provide some degree of control based on the
parents´ wishes, any so-called agreement is basically meaningless."
Solid Oak plans to offer a free age-identification tool for
parents if MySpace or any of the other content providers will support
it. According to Solid Oak, any web server can easily support their
V-Token technology with existing scripting languages. Solid Oak also
plans to make the technology available to other Internet filtering
software publishers free of charge.