danah on O'Reilly Factor

So this post yet again deals with on-line communities. It’s interesting how I found out about the women on whom I’m writing about. I was skimming through the flickr account of the host of one of the pod-cast that I watch and I came across a few pics of people that she had interviewed. I decided to find out a little bit more about them. Danah Boyd was the one that really stood out to me. She is a PHD student and researcher that talks about social networking through on-line communities such as Friendster and Myspace. I found it interesting to find out different programs she has been on just to talk about her expertise. I did a youtube search and found this video where she is interviewed on the O’Reilly factor talking about Myspace and talking about on-line predators and them hunting down under-age teens. It got me to think not just about Myspace, but Flickr, Youtube and other social networks and wondering just how safe are they. As in Youtube, you can easily find porn on there. That same goes for Flickr. Now I know that the administrators of these sites do what they can to regulate and secure stuff like that from users who are underage, but just how secure are they really. I mean you hear about kids getting hurt and raped all the time in normal day society, but now people are using these social networks to find and I apologize for using this term, but prey on-line. I mean these sites are meant to create a new method for society to interact with one another, but now people are using to be destructive and find ways to hurt other in spaces that should be safe. I know it has to be hard to regulate and work to secure this different sites especially with people lying about their age just to get to media and people that they shouldn’t, but the more I think about it, is there really way to make it all that safe. It’s like computers and people creating viruses for them. No matter how hard you try to make them secure, their will always be someone to find a way to crack it. I just hate to see people using things that should be used to help society, but instead use them to hurt others.