Which of the following is TRUE about the safety of putting photos online?

M: Ruth Peters is a child psychologist, hey, Ruth, good morning. Nice to have you back.
W: Good morning, Matt.
M: I look at it like the rules for photos online are a little bit like the rules for wearing a microphone around here. If you don’t want someone to hear it, you don’t say while you are wearing a microphone. If you don’t want someone to see the pictures, don’t put them online.
W: There is absolutely no control once it goes online. I don’t care if it says it’s personal, it’s private, whatever. Once it’s on there, somebody can actually copy it, paste it to their own website or into their own computer. And even if you sanitize that site afterward, those people still have it.
M: And if you are a parent, and you’ve got teenagers, daughters, sons, this Facebook craze, and this MySpace craze is part of their daily socialization, how do you convince them that what can seem fun at one moment can become a nightmare another moment.
W: Well, first of all, I think what Miss New Jersey did is probably did more for all of this than anybody could do. And so I think what you do is, you talk to your child, you explain it to them, and then you have to supervise them. That’s the key word; you have to supervise your kids online.
M: I’ll talk about supervising them in just a second but I think a parent has to say to a child, look, this is for your friends and your family. These are the people who are supposed to see these photos. But it only takes one angry friend or one jealous friend to make these things public.
W: Exactly, and that’s where we say you do not have control, and so if you want to send photos to your friends or families, send them an email with that on. It doesn’t have to go into this public sphere.
M: So parents have to familiarize themselves with Facebook and MySpace and all these things. At least they can help their children.
W: And it’s easy, most parents think that the technology is bafflement beyond them, but it’s really very simple to start your own account, to go in, and be able to look and see what your children are doing.
M: Alright, so talk to me about different age groups and how much monitoring parents should be doing with their kids and these types of pages.
W: I think you start that with talk about who your kid is. There are some kids that are really really good and really easy and all you have to do is just check it once in a while. But other kids are squally and impulsive and you don’t trust their judgment. Well, I would sit down and say, urn, I’m paying for the Internet, what your site is on there is my site, it will embarrass me. I am going to be checking it frequently and randomly.
M: Yeah, and parents should absolutely have the passwords, they should be able to get in no matter what.
W: Or there is no site, I mean it’s just very clear. I am paying for it, the password is mine too.
M: Does the parent make the child responsible for everything on the site? In other words, you know, a friend might put something on my child’s Facebook account or MySpace page. So then is my child responsible for that?
W: Absolutely, and that’s the rule I use with my kid clients. It is that I don’t care what kind of language your friends are using, if it’s on there and it’s bad language, you are responsible. You either have to block them or you lose the site. And your language has to be very appropriate because people will judge you by who you associate with.
M: And as these kids get older, they get to be of college age to at least college application age, and of job age, these accounts, these pages can come back to haunt them.
W: They are public, because, urn, you know, the college admissions councils are now using them for grad school, and also employers, their Human Resource departments are always going to look. So what I tell people to do is if you have to have an account, use your first name as your first name, your middle name as your last name, very difficult for other people to find out.
M: But again, the most important thing, it’s not private. If you put it on the Internet in any way, shape or form, it’s not private.
W: It’s not private. And you wouldn’t let your kid to go down to the dark alley without supervision. Don’t let them go into the dark alley of the Internet without supervision.
M: Ruth Peters, well said. Thanks very much.
W: Thank you, Matt!