Yes, in most all cases you need to prove who you are to the site owner. Also, in order to keep pedifiles and other unwanted persons searching for children through pages like myspace. They need to sections these areas off, if you are over the age of 18, then you can not have access to anyone younger than that. There are age verification programs out there. Need to come up with sort of plan with this type of scenario embedded in them. Thanks for listening, I hope someone has a better idea. And, yes, you couldjust keep the younger ones off these kind of sites, but that doesn’t give them any freedom, just creates a bubble around them. They need to get involved with discussion boards and posts. They indeed do have a voice, since they are the voice of the future.

While I happen to think that anonymity is needed online, we must also look at the reality of the issue. You can never definitively prove who anyone is online. And I mean never. I run WikiLou.com, and believe me there are times that I would love to know who is editing the site. However, the good comes with the bad. If I made everyone prove who they were, people would be scared to post things like http://wikilou.com/wiki/index.php?title=Abuses_by_St._Louis_Area_Police because they would be scared of the repercussions. So as much as anonymous editors annoy me from time to time, I will accept them for what they are, and for all the good that comes with them.

Jeff, how do you really prove anyone’s age or identity on the internet? What kind of age verification program would possibly work? Should we require scans of a birth certificate? Go look at yours and see how hard it would be to fake. Not very difficult. Should we require facial scans? How many times have you mistaken someone’s age? I doubt a computer could do better.

I think the real responsibility here comes with parents. No, you do not want to shelter your children and keep them in a bubble. However, you don’t want them to take things so seriously that they go hanging themselves. Parenting, people, parenting is the key. Parenting requires healthy freedom with healthy rules, not too much of one or the other.

For starters, It would be diffcult at best to enforce such a mandate. Furthermore…how would you feel if you went out in public and were required to hold a sign with a copy of your drivers liscense on it . What if the next time you went to the grocery store ,the mall, or ANYWHERE for that matter …you were required to annouce your presence and then confirm your identity? Would it be worth it ?…Would you tolerate that? What if the next time you went to the ol mail box …U had to tell uncle sam that you were getting your mail now …then prove your identity? Think about it .

I rather enjoy the anonymity of a crowd ..and I think the Internet is NO different. It is a freedom I enjoy and a freedom I am unwilling to part with. ITS MY RIGHT
I am all for security ..but give me a break. “Those who would sacrifice Freedoms for security …deserve neither”

Mike:

I agree that the anonymity of the internet is part of what makes it unique and inviting whether to share experiences without fear of reprisal or to simply engage in an online “relationship” with a “cyber friend”. However, to simply absolve the internet, and society, of any responsibility for the protection of others, specifically children, under the umbrella of “it’s the parents responsibility” is as naive as to say that authentication requirements would solve all the problems.

In the case of most sites, you can be made to authenticate your identity to those running the site, but then the other users with whom you interact only know as much as you are willing to share. The anonymity you refer to is still present yet a 40 year old man can be prevented from accessing the profiles of 15 year old girls.

In today’s age of cell phones with cameras and internet access, it is truly impossible for parents to have complete and total monitoring ability over what their children engage in online. While certain values and ethics can certainly be instilled by parents, other lines of protection against online abuses need to be in place to help parents. Every child at some point is going to attempt to “rebel” against their parents so no amount of parental oversight will ever be enough.

Society should make every attempt to help protect our youngest citizens from the most harmful of elements if at all possible. Requiring identification authentication, while certainly not fool-proof, is certainly one simple step that could be employed to accomplish this goal.

like u care:

Just for clarification purposes, the internet is not a “right” any more than driving a care is a “right”. There is no constitutional protection covering the use of the internet beyond freedom of speech and, even with identity authentication, that freedom would not necessarily be sacrificed.

The adult could not have pulled off the scam in person or on the telephone. Sexual predators are punished for contacting anyone under 18 and pretending to be someone they are not, so maybe this act points to drawing the line and self-identifying in adult/child conversations.

Parents shouldn’t blame themselves for things like this. Kids get caught up in bad situations all of the time. Children may not have acquired the necessary skills to manage these types of situations.

This is like asking if someone should have to verify who they are before they run an ad in the personals. I tell my daughter that a lot of times, the internet is like TV; it’s not real (even reality tv, for that matter.)
Unless you personally know who you are dealing with, you should treat it the same way as a cartoon.

IF YOU DON’T WANT WHAT HAPPENED TO HAPPEN THEN YES YOU PROVE YOUR IDENTITY.
PRETTY STUPID QUESTION

This is Cathy Dwyer from Pace responding. Very interesting comments. I teach computing, and I want to emphasize you shouldn’t have too much faith in the ability of technology to manage a complex problem such as wide scale authentication. As a for instance, consider the use of the data aggregator ChoicePoint to remove convicted felons from the voter rolls in Florida for the 2000 election (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint). According to congressional testimony, if there was an 80% match for information such as first name, last name, middle initial, etc., then that person would be dropping from the voter rolls. If that standard is not good enough, then what criteria would you use to authenticate someone? Would it involve biometrics (i.e., eye scans, fingerprints, or DNA)? How would you maintain it (births, deaths, immigration)? Who would pay for it?

Another problem is the more you use something for identification, the more it becomes something you need to keep “private” to protect yourself. Only a few years ago, social security numbers were commonly used in all kinds of systems. I used to post student grades by social security number, rather than by name. Now it is treated as something that you need to guard and conceal. If we start scanning our birth certificates for every online interaction, it will dilute its value for proving identity.