Presence

the aggregator that i use had an ad for a pornographic website just above the link to this post of yours. it was almost like 'how to raise...' was a caption for the site.
i'd take a snapshot of it, but i really don't want to encourage traffic to the advertised site.

Please do post back and let us know how it was.

So who spoke and what did they say?

I was there. and I'll summerize with a few points from the evening.
There were approx. 150 people there (includes men and women).
Rabbi Schwartz, middle school principal introduced everyone.
Rabbi Heber than spoke and discussed how internet has become the greatest danger and challenge to our generation. He mentioned how destructive it has been etc etc
Then the agent from the FBI spoke. He discussed the protypes who are both predators and victims, and how they "find" their potential victims. (I actually thought he was pretty tame, but some people and rabbaim that sat near me, thought his presentation was "shocking").
Last speaker was Rabbi Lowenthal from TA. He made many good points and I will highlight the few I thought that really stood out.
1) He showed statistics from teh middle school and high school in TA of student use of the internet. The shocking statistic was the high percentage (90 something %) of parents trust their kids to go online with out checking out what they are viewing or who they are chatting with.
2) Even families who don't have internet, it will not mean their kids do not have access. The wireless card is very small and can be easily hidden. There are many people using wireless now, and only 30% encript it. This means, that a kid can very well use wireless in his home (using someone else's service) that is supposidely internet free. Its also amazing to see how small the gadgets are getting.
3) Kids do not tell their parents of any possible online danger because they are afraid their parents will over react and pull the plug. Parents have to understand that not over reacting might mean - not pulling the plug but rather making some adjustments.
4) Onlysimchas is an online addiction for some people. It is also the myspace for the frum community. People are leaving their personal phone numbers in guest book messages. They also put their pictures, with their names and cities they are from - making them easily traceable. (just my own thought -- would you want your kids picture, name and location available to any potential predator thats out there?)
5) The reality is that 60 something % of kids in TA are using internet for any useful purpose. The focus is not on how we should ban the internet but rather accepting the reality that internet is a daily tool, now how do we control this tool from potential dangers.

Thanks Mo; I was unable to attend the meeting. I'm glad to hear the approach taken was one of accomadation and not knee-jerk reaction.

I personally think the risk of online predators is rather low (I know this is a very popular topic, Dateline, etc.), but I could be wrong.

Interesting topic. The internet issue is an issue for all schools. Don't kid yourself that myspace is not also an issue for the frum community. Any parent who closes their eyes and let's their kids on the internet with no filtering or monitoring is asking for a percentage of kids (no matter their school) to get sucked in.

All schools are dealing with this issue. Below is a letter I scanned in that was sent to Rambam middle and high school parents. I included links at the bottom for where the school sent attachments.

We should all hope that parents wake up and not fall asleep in their responsibilities to their children. The schools can't do the parenting too although some parents assume they should.

*******************************

May 26, 2006
??"? ???? ???"?
Dear Parents,

We are writing to inform and educate you about a new serious internet phenomenon that you may or may not be familiar with, which challenges and concerns many people today, www.myspace.com .

Myspace is a social network that has recently dramatically increased in popularity (particularly among adolescents) and has many parents and educators worried. Unlike AOL instant messenger, myspace.com is graphic, textual, interactive, and universally open to the world with very few real inherent internal borders or limits built-in.
In order to participate in Myspace.com, a child creates a profile of himself/herself. That profile can include photographs, music, video and other graphics, and there are few limits as to the content that it can contain, from the most explicit words to explicit graphics, music and videos. Once this profile is created, anyone using the internet can enter the child's profile and leave messages, pictures, music or videos (all without any internal limits).

The following questions and answers are intended to explain some specific aspects of Myspace which are commonly misunderstood:

Question #1: "My child has made his/her profile private - have I now protected my child and is he/she now safe?"
Answer: NO. By making a profile private, a child has only limited the access to all the information listed in his/her profile to those participants invited by the child, so that only those who have been invited by the child may view the information that is in his/her profile (which also includes all the messages, pictures, audio, and video left by others). Although that protects any specific private information about your child in his/her Myspace profile from being made public, it has no effect on messages, pictures, audios or videos left by your child on the Myspace profiles of his/her friends. If that friend's profile is not private - all that information is now public. Additionally, even if his/her friend's profile is private, the information left by your child is open to be seen by anyone that his/her friend "invites" into their profile. Therefore, a child designating his/her profile as private does not necessarily offer greater security or privacy, since he/she has no control of the privacy of material that he/she posts on other people's profiles. Once inside Myspace, the door is wide open to the world with few, if any, effective precautions.

Question #2: "If my child has removed his/her picture associated with his/her profile, is my child now safe?"
Answer: NO. Since the picture is only one part of the profile, removing it does not measurably increase a child's safety, particularly since others have free access to the child's Myspace profile (if it is not private), and other people can still view the child's postings on other non-private profiles (see answer #1 above).

Many news magazine programs have recently broadcast segments pointing out the risks of Myspace. We have attached a transcript from the MSNBC Dateline segment, as well as another article, which you may find helpful. Additionally, many educational articles are available by searching in Google using the words "Myspace danger."

We encourage you to be proactive and vigilant with respect to any interaction your child may have with Myspace.com. In that regard, The Parent Resource Place of the Center for Jewish Education will be offering "An Evening of Information and Computer Safety" for families on Monday, June 12th from 7:30 - 9:00 pm (doors open at 7) at Pikesville High School, 7621 Labyrinth, corner of Smith and Labyrinth. If you need more information, you can call the Parent Place at 410-356-9342.

We hope this letter has been informative.

Please feel free to contact any of us should you have any additional questions.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Rita Shloush, Ph.D.
Head of School

Rabbi Howard Bald
Principal, Middle School/High School

Sharon Buck, Psy.
School Psychologist

http://www.paramuspost.com/article.php/20060515001309497
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12192496/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12242009/

Dovid,

Interesting letter, thanks for posting this. I was aware that Rambam had a large-scale crackdown on MySpace usage amongst their high school students (I had considered posting about this, but decided not to). I didn't know about this letter though. Thanks.

I wasnt saying that I thought MySpace wasn't a threat or attraction to frum kids...I'm just skeptical that sexual predators are that serious a threat...I could be wrong though.

Concerning Mo's summary of the meeting: Anyone who thinks Onlysimchas is like Myspace is delusional-or just hasn't ever seen Myspace or Onlysimchas. I don't mean to be a staunch defeender of Onlysimchas, but while it's often silly, it's not slightly comparable to Myspace.

Greg,
It only takes one incident to make it one incident too many. I think if God forbid, there is ever a publicized incident in the frum community involving a predator, people will start taking it very seriously. Right now, its about prevention.

Jewboy: the point was that people are posting information on OnlySimchas like their phone number and pictures that could be used to identify them and/or other acts of predation. In this way it is similar to myspace in that people will disclose more information than is nec. safe in all cases, especially for teens.

Thanks for posting that letter Dovid. I'm really glad to see that Rambam is staying on top of myspace and more importantly notifying parents that they should be aware of what their kids are doing. In general I'm not the type of person that is shocked by a lot, but my jaw really, really dropped when I saw some Rambam kids myspace pages. Let's not even talk about what I saw on my sister's public school friends myspace pages.

Although, I wonder if perhaps it's better to track your kids/students without their knowledge then to shut them down and drive it underground...I suppose if their safety is an issue, it's not a question, but putting that aside, it could be a useful tool for understanding where your kids/students are "holding."

Greg-Yeah, I know what the attempted comparision was, i just don't think it's a very good one. I have yet to see a phone number on Onlysimchas. While it can be abused, I don't think it's anything like Myspace. I was glad to see Rambam attempting to educate its parents about Myspace.

Jewboy,
I have personally seen quite a few phone numbers listed in OS guest books.
I also want to clarify something: I don't think anyone will disagree that myspace.com is worse than only simchas. In fact, if you want to see just how scary and vulenerable some of "our own community's" kids, just do some searches on myspace using schools, neighborhoods, and frum sounding names and you will be shocked at what you'll see.
Having said that, when I was at the meeting in TA, I think it was amazing how few parents even knew what myspace.com is!!
However, all the parents knew what only simchas is. Perhaps, if people are educated and can apprciate potential problems from one website, then can only begin to understand just how much worse the problem really is on a website like myspace.com
Btw... speaking of myspace.com, check out this story that broke today: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198848,00.html

Mo,

It is great TA opened the topic to parents but it seems sad, from your comments, if all TA did was place the parents fear on possible predators and use only simchas as the source of the problem to a clueless audience, it did little to deal with the real issue (greg is right that likely predators is not a serious issue) out of touch parents have with their kids completely exposing themselves to smut and vulgar language and graphics. They should have given a live demo of myspace and watched these parents jump out of their chairs and just maybe they would wake up.

My kid told me one kid's myspace profile was the last straw for this kid and the kid was expelled.

i did my own looking and it is very easy by clicking through friends to friends that all schools have participants but beth tfiloh, ncsy and shoresh kids are extremely heavy into this behavior.

All these organizations ought to wake up and start educating parents and kids or this issue is only going to get worse.

There has been a "sting operation" at BY this week regarding my space where someone (not a BY teacher) set up a profile pertending to be a BY girl and "found" all the other BY Baltimore girls who were online and found that some of the BY Baltimore girls were up to some dubious activity. This person brough this to the attention to the vaad hachinuch of BY to see what the girls are really doing in their spare time. I think BY also recently has a study with internet in the home where 75% of the girls have it at home and 50% are left unsupervised.