The popularity of services like Bebo.com among teenagers means parents need to be aware of their children's online activities, the site's chief safety officer tells John Downes.
Young people were key to the explosion in the use of text messaging, and now they are spearheading the next generation of internet communication, social networking. They need to be made aware, however, that their online activities can be traced back to them, regardless of how anonymous they believe these sites are. These are among the key messages Dr Rachel O'Connell believes must be put across to parents and educators as we enter a new era of web-based communication.
The impact of these sites is as important a development as the introduction of the first printing press, she argues. An expert who has advised the British government and the EU on child internet safety, O'Connell has also in the past advised the writers of Coronation Street on the subject of online grooming by child abusers.
As part of her research for her PhD in Psychology at University College, Cork, she also posed as a child in online chatroom research, an experience that meant she had to receive regular counselling afterwards.
O'Connell (37) was appointed last July as chief safety officer with Bebo - one of the leading "next-generation" social networking sites.
Launched in July 2005 and targeted at younger internet users, within 12 months Bebo claimed to have become the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. It claimed significant growth in other markets, such as the USA and Australia, with a total of 25 million registered members. There are an estimated 500,000 members in Ireland and this number is growing. But what is it that has young people so interested in sites such as Bebo, and others like MySpace, and what do they allow participants to do?
Bebo lets members write blogs and share pictures and messages with friends who are on the service. Each member has a personal page and the overall size of such sites develops when an initial set of members send out messages inviting their friends to join them on the site. New members repeat the process, growing the total number of members and links in the network.
Young people have a need to communicate, and social networking websites facilitate this in a relatively cheap and accessible manner, O'Connell believes. This can be hugely beneficial, allowing them to develop valuable skills, she points out. But while young people may originally have used the internet for homework, research and e-mailing, they are now accessing user-generated content, chatrooms and interactive material on the web.
Children invest a lot of time and effort in representing themselves on such sites. Increasingly, they see websites such as Bebo as an extension of their real lives, O'Connell believes.
But there are at least two major problems associated with the phenomenon: the risk of cyberbullying and how to verify the age of users to avoid "grooming" of young children and teenagers by older men.
A recent Department of Education survey found that one in 10 Irish children who arranged to meet someone they first came across on the internet experienced physical threats and abuse. In all cases of physical and verbal abuse reported in the survey of internet usage among 848 9/16-year-olds, the person who introduced himself or herself as a child turned out to be an adult.
But O'Connell claims that significant progress has been made within the industry on tackling online abuse and bullying. For example, many social networking websites already have educational tools which provide guidance for every young person or adult using the site at each critical point in the process, she says.
"One of the biggest problem areas around social networking is bullying, and the fact that young people or adults believe they are anonymous online," she acknowledges.
She is aware of two incidences of "happy slapping" on Bebo - where a victim is attacked and someone else records it, typically on a camera phone - since she took over her new role.
"One of the major educational things we need to get out to [ young people] is that every message you send has a unique address. They need to know that if law enforcement has to get involved, or a solicitor or the school authorities, it can be traced back to them . . . There is a critical record of their bad behaviour."
Bebo also plans to place an explanatory video for parents - who, she says, can find the whole area of social networking "daunting" - on the Bebo home page shortly.
Over the past six months, O'Connell has participated in an industrywide initiative in Britain which also included law enforcement, children's charities and the British government.
This has led to a consultation process which is due to be completed in the middle of January and includes the Internet Advisory Board in Ireland. The aim of all this is to provide a set of "best practice" guidelines for child online safety. However, such guidelines have no legal basis.
For its part, Bebo says that its "report abuse" button is responded to within 24 hours, and it offers an option to report serious abuse directly to police (in the UK). It hopes to extend this to Ireland as well.
You have to be 13 to set up an account with Bebo and the company "actively checks" to ensure that no one below this age does so, according to O'Connell.
Yet, worryingly for parents, she acknowledges that it remains very difficult to establish the true age of an individual using such websites.
One good way of combating this might be to allow every school pupil in the State to use an e-mail address supplied by the Government as a means of verifying their age when using sites such as Bebo, O'Connell suggests.
However, she accepts that certain considerations, such as data protection and privacy for users, would first have to be addressed, for example the need to ensure that commercial companies and school authorities could not access personal information.
"I think it would be fabulous, it would give incredible peace of mind, and also drive home to young people the fact that you're not anonymous," she says. "We need to really push and think outside the box and look for solutions."
Another possibility being considered by one company is getting parents to sign age verification forms in schools and having these sent back to the service provider.
These are all possibilities. But, as O'Connell points out, next-generation social networking websites are here to stay. The choice for parents is to either ignore what is going on in their children's online lives or to actively engage with them to make sure they are safe.
"I would say as a parent the single most important thing that any parent can do is to open the lines of communication with young people," she says. "You need to be as aware of what is going on online as offline. Say to your kids: no matter what you do or say, come and talk to me and I will respond in a calm way."