An exhaustively researched report on the safety of the web is the result of a year of work for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. The report reveals some surprises about just how safe the web and social networks really are for minors, and some recommendations for dealing with sexual predators, cyberbullying, and access to explicit content. Members of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force discuss their findings in a podcast made available below by MediaBerkman, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society Podcast.

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The discussion follows a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force: Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies. Among their findings on risk and prevention are:

• Sexual predation on minors by adults, both online and offline, remains a concern. Sexual predation in all its forms, including when it involves statutory rape, is an abhorrent crime. Much of the research based on law-enforcement cases involving Internet-related child exploitation predated the rise of social networks. This research found that cases typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity. The Task Force notes that more research specifically needs to be done concerning the activities of sex offenders in social network sites and other online environments, and encourages law enforcement to work with researchers to make more data available for this purpose. Youth report sexual solicitation of minors by minors more frequently, but these incidents, too, are understudied, underreported to law enforcement, and not part of most conversations about online safety.
• Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline.
• The Internet increases the availability of harmful, problematic and illegal content, but does not always increase minors’ exposure. Unwanted exposure to pornography does occur online, but those most likely to be exposed are those seeking it out, such as older male minors. Most research focuses on adult pornography and violent content, but there are also concerns about other content, including child pornography and the violent, pornographic, and other problematic content that youth themselves generate.
• The risk profile for the use of different genres of social media depends on the type of risk, common uses by minors, and the psychosocial makeup of minors who use them. Social network sites are not the most common space for solicitation and unwanted exposure to problematic content, but are frequently used in peer-to-peer harassment, most likely because they are broadly adopted by minors and are used primarily to reinforce pre-existing social relations.
• Minors are not equally at risk online. Those who are most at risk often engage in risky behaviors and have difficulties in other parts of their lives. The psychosocial makeup of and family dynamics surrounding particular minors are better predictors of risk than the use of specific media or technologies.
• Although much is known about these issues, many areas still require further research. For example, too little is known about the interplay among risks and the role that minors themselves play in contributing to unsafe environments.

Sony Music agreed to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it knowingly collected and disclosed personal information of as many as 30,000 children under the age of 13, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. It illustrates the special obligations of companies interactions with children online that they would do well to keep in mind when setting policies and business objectives.

• Wired: Sony Dinged $1 Million for Child-Privacy Breach
• United States of America (For the Federal Trade Commission), Plaintiff, v. Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a general partnership subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, Defendant (United States District Court For the Southern District of New York), Case No. 08 CV 10730 (LAK)

As an increasing number of youth as young as 14 sign up for online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, prosecutors have been increasingly using these websites to find incriminating photos and other evidence. According to an AP/CBS News Report and GritsforBreakfast, a prosecutor was able to convince a judge to sentence a 20 year old defendant to two years in prison for a drunk driving car crash that injured a woman by showing the Court photos posted on Facebook of the defendant at a Halloween party in an orange jumpsuit labeled ‘jail bird’ merely two weeks after he was charged.

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case.

Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.

“Social networking sites are just another way that people say things or do things that come back and haunt them,” said Phil Malone, director of the cyberlaw clinic at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The things that people say online or leave online are pretty permanent.”

The pictures, when shown at sentencing, not only embarrass defendants but also can make it harder for them to convince a judge that they’re remorseful or that their drunken behavior was an aberration. (Of course, the sites are also valuable for defense lawyers looking to dig up dirt to undercut the credibility of a star prosecution witness.)

Prosecutors do not appear to be scouring networking sites while preparing for every sentencing, even though telling photos of criminal defendants are sometimes available in plain sight and accessible under a person’s real name. But in cases where they’ve had reason to suspect incriminating pictures online, or have been tipped off to a particular person’s MySpace or Facebook page, the sites have yielded critical character evidence.

“It’s not possible to do it in every case,” said Darryl Perlin, a senior prosecutor in Santa Barbara County, Calif. “But certain cases, it does become relevant.”

Perlin said he was willing to recommend probation for Lara Buys for a 2006 drunken driving crash that killed her passenger — until he thought to check her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing.

The page featured photos of Buys — taken after the crash but before sentencing — holding a glass of wine as well as joking comments about drinking. Perlin used the photos to argue for a jail sentence instead of probation, and Buys, then 22, got two years in prison.

“Pending sentencing, you should be going to (Alcoholics Anonymous), you should be in therapy, you should be in a program to learn to deal with drinking and driving,” Perlin said. “She was doing nothing other than having a good old time.”

Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met his client Jessica Binkerd, a recent college graduate charged with a fatal drunken driving crash, he asked if she had a MySpace page. When she said yes, he told her to take it down because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light.

But she didn’t remove the page. And right before Binkerd was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney said he was “blindsided” by a presentencing report from prosecutors that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash.

One showed Binkerd holding a beer bottle. Others had her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses.

Binkerd wasn’t doing anything illegal, but Balash said the photos hurt her anyway. She was given more than five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.

“When you take those pictures like that, it’s a hell of an impact,” he said.

Rhode Island prosecutors say Lipton was drunk and speeding near his school, Bryant University in Smithfield, in October 2006 when he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies hospitalized for weeks.

Sullivan, the prosecutor, said another victim of the crash gave him copies of photographs from Lipton’s Facebook page that were posted after the collision. Sullivan assembled the pictures — which were posted by someone else but accessible on Lipton’s page — into a PowerPoint presentation at sentencing.

One image shows a smiling Lipton at the Halloween party, clutching cans of the energy drink Red Bull with his arm draped around a young woman in a sorority T-shirt. Above it, Sullivan rhetorically wrote, “Remorseful?”

Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said the prosecutor’s slide show influenced his decision to sentence Lipton.

“I did feel that gave me some indication of how that young man was feeling a short time after a near-fatal accident, that he thought it was appropriate to joke and mock about the possibility of going to prison,” the judge said in an interview.

Kevin Bristow, Lipton’s attorney, said the photos didn’t accurately reflect his client’s character or level of remorse, and made it more likely he’d get prison over probation.

“The pictures showed a kid who didn’t know what to do two weeks after this accident,” Bristow said, adding that Lipton wrote apologetic letters to the victim and her family and was so upset that he left college. “He didn’t know how to react.”

Still, he uses the incident as an example to his own teenage children to watch what they post online.

“If it shows up under your name you own it,” he said, “and you better understand that people look for that stuff.”

From Danah Boyd, we learned of a MacArthur Forum, “Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics” which now has its video online.

On April 23, 2008, public forum, “From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth,” reported on the interim findings of the ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation, “Kids’ Informal Learning through Digital Media,” conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California. The event addressed how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. The forum was presented by Common Sense Media, the MacArthur Foundation and the Stanford University School of Education.

Introduction: Julie Stasch, the Vice President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Part II

• Mimi Ito, University of Southern California, Participatory Learning in a Networked Society:Lessons From the Digital Youth Project
• Danah Boyd, University of California Berkeley, Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics
• Heather Horst, University of California Berkeley, Understanding New Media in the Home
• Dilan Mahendran, University of California Berkeley, Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age

Part III: panel discussion featuring Dale Dougherty,General Manager, Maker Media Division, O’Reilly Media; Deborah Stipek, Dean, Stanford University School of Education; Kenny Miller, EVP & Creative Director, MTV Networks’ Global Digital Media; Linda Burch, Chief Education & Strategy Officer,
Common Sense Media and moderator Connie Yowell, Director of Education, The MacArthur Foundation