Re: Bill to Curb Online Predators Criticized

So, do we parse the acronym as *KID* *SPA* (as in children in a hot tub) or as *KIDS* *PA* (as in "who's your daddy?")? Either way, it sounds like it should've been written by Mark Foley.

Anyway, "keeping" the Internet devoid of sexual predators is rather like "keeping" Baghdad free of car bombs: you have to *get* it free before you can *keep* it free. That's just one reason I agree that this bill is much more show than substance.

The other thing I'd like to see far more of is proactive effort at teaching the kids how to spot online personas they should steer clear of. It's all fine and good to work at taking predators off the net, but shouldn't we teach the potential prey a thing or two about staying out of harm's way? After all, we teach kids to look for traffic before we teach them to drive. If they're old enough to be on the Internet, they're old enough to be told some of the things that should set off alarm bells:

• Any photo of you that spends a nanosecond on the Internet is out in public forever. Therefore, never e-mail *ANYONE* a photo that you wouldn't want your mother to post on your fridge or your worst enemy to post on every locker in school.

• Any info you put online that identifies your name, address, or telephone number, or even just what school you go to, is really useful for creepy people who want to track you down and hurt you. Make sure you only give that kind of info to people that you know *offline*.

• If you're under 18, and an adult starts talking sexy, and then wants you to dress up or shave "down there" or otherwise do something to make you look even younger, RUN AWAY *SCREAMING*. The "talking sexy" part is "smoke," but the "look younger" part is a five-alarm fire.

• If anyone -- a grownup or another kid -- tries to push you into a sexual situation, that person is not being a good friend, not even a little bit. That includes "if you REALLY love me," and "you're not some kind of a prude, are you?" and any other comments meant to embarrass you or emotionally blackmail you into sex.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What I heard is that the acronym is simply 'KIDS' for the first part of the total expression, or 'KIDSPA' (without the hyphen). Your rules of thumb are pretty good, but I would make one change: In your rule "If you are under 18 and an adult" I would drop the 'if you are under 18 part' .... and just say if that sort of thing happens for anyone -- after all, the person you are chatting with _is_ essentially a stranger -- my advice would be to cut the connection then and there, unless you do things like that for total strangers. And regards your last rule, "if you really love me" I do not see how that could be possible (love) based on the very limited conversation to date. And I would possibly add another rule to those you have given: generally, stay away from Yahoo, AOL or MSN chat. Those three, along with IRC are about the biggest wastes of time and bandwidth on the net.

Finally, feel free to transmit

times during an open chat session. PAT]