MySpace Is Really Everyone's Space
Rachelle is typing a message to her daughter's MySpace account. She mumbles the words as she types. "Briauna, I just wanted to say hi. It's been a week since I lasted talked with you. Love Mom and Dad".
Last year, Briauna joined nearly 70 million other people that have created their own personal web pages on MySpace.com. The online social networking web site owned by Rupert Murdock's News Corp. It's become a runaway hit for both teenagers and adults. Its monthly traffic is two and a half times of the search engine Google. It's starting to rival Internet powerhouses like AOL and Yahoo for most page views.
In October, Rachelle says, Briauna met Benjamin Wyatt on MySpace. She says Wyatt contacted Briauna because the two shared a mutual interest in the same music and raves.
Rachelle says she never let her daughter attend raves. But on January 6th, after telling her parents she was spending a night at a friend's house, Briauna attended a rave with Wyatt. Briauna never came back.
"She needs to come home. She's 15. He's 18 and it's not right," says Rachelle.
And that's not all. According to the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office, Wyatt is a convicted sex offender from Bremerton with a history of domestic violence, assault and forgery.
Deputy Scott Wilson said Wyatt ran away with a 14-year-old girl from Mason County last year. Wyatt was 17 at the time. The two were caught by police in Bakersfield but no charges were filed.
Rachelle believes Briauna posted too much information about herself on MySpace and became easy prey.
"We are computer literate around here," says Rachelle. "I was monitoring her activities. Thought we had a good handle on it. Apparently, I didn't."
Not Just Music Anymore
MySpace was launched about three years ago. Its popularity was spurred by fans of local music scenes around the country as a place where they could get information about their favorite local bands.
The web site has gone way beyond music. Users can create their own page for free with just a couple of mouse clicks, a user name and password.
The web site encourages users to post personal information about themselves but it's not required. Users can make their pages private so only invited friends can view the information, but MySpace doesn't make that option very obvious.
"People are posting way too much information about themselves on MySpace and other social networking sites and with each clue, it makes it easy for someone you don't know to find you or steal your identity," says Linda Criddle, author, mother and Project Manager for Microsoft. She regularly teaches kids and adults of the dangers of posting too much.
Her advice is simple: don't post anything personal about yourself or your friends and family. That includes, pictures, phone numbers, school and work information, birthdays and personal emails.
"If I want to steal your identity and impersonate you, any bit of this information can be used to build a profile on you or track you down," says Criddle.
Visible To Anyone
To prove how easy it was for us to find somebody, especially a teenager, KOMO 4 News carried out a simple test.
After creating a MySpace account, we logged onto the events page, typed in our zip code and looked for people planning a get-together within 10 miles of us. We found an invitation to a barbeque involving teenagers with the line, "everyone in your junior high is invited" - a lighting rod for predator.
We clicked on the profiles of kids who said they plan to attend. In those profiles we found their pictures, information about them and the schools they attend. If they didn't post that information on their page, we were able to glean it from the pages in their network of friends.
MySpace makes it very easy to follow a user's trail of friends. We printed off the information and showed up at a Kirkland park where the barbeque was taking place, except nobody knew we were coming.
We watched for a half hour and recognized some of the kids from the pictures we had downloaded. Then we did something a predator wouldn't have done, let them know we had been following them.
We found Sarah, a bubbly teenager who we recognized from a picture on her MySpace page. We asked if she had any idea how we found her. She said she didn't know.
Sarah had never posted her real name on her page but her friends gave up her identity through their pages and comments to her. We told her how we found her.
"Oh my god," says Sarah. "My mom was just giving me a lecture about that the other day. I was just talking about how that's crazy, no one can find me."
But we did.
Tracking Predators
This scenario happens every day in Trent Bergman's world. The Seattle Police detective spends his day on MySpace and other social networking sites posing as a teenager to find predators.
"It takes me just a few minutes for an adult to contact me and ask me to engage in sexual activity," says Bergman. He says people who put out too much information are doing the legwork for predators and identity thieves.
Even in the vastness of the Internet, it's a small world. In one case, Bergman, whose image on the Internet has been digitally altered to look like a 13-year-old girl, had predator pretended to be him.
"When they sent me their picture, it was actually my picture that I used in another investigation when I was a child," says Bergman. "So there are people out there that will steal your identity, will steal your pictures and use them saying they are themselves."
Briauna Lee occasionally posts pictures of her on her MySpace page, almost to taunt her mother to find her, but there's never enough information in the picture to reveal her location.
"I think she's in New York," says Rachelle. "Its so frustrating to see that they've been on and there's nothing I can do".
She's living the hard lesson. MySpace users think it's their space, but it's really everyone's space.