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MySpace Age Verification Agreement Meaningless, Says CYBERsitter CEO

Posted on: Wednesday, 16 January 2008, 12:00 CST

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.

Source: Business Wire

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