MyYearbook: Adult Friend Finder For Kids?

 "I am a [male/female] looking for [male/female] within [15 miles/30 miles/statewide]." Sounds like a dating Web site, right? Friend Finder? E-harmony? Yahoo Dating? No, it's a Web site that was designed for teens by teens. The Web site boasts having "over 15 million members flirting, talking, playing games, and donating to causes". Social networking is all fine and good, but the first time I received an invitation to join my sisters on there and I logged in, I thought, Hmm. Booty calls for kids?

Yes, it's a site where kids can play games, join causes they can donate to using the site's own special currency, talk to their friends from school, take quizzes, read the latest about teen news and issues, post pictures and update their status, but what else does this site have to offer? Every time I checked my e-mail I would see something that said "Mrs. Hozey, you have three new secret admirers!" Oh really? So people are admiring the picture taken at our wedding of our two ringed left hands? Interesting. So I logged in to see who they were. A list of guys and their pictures popped up and the message on the screen told me to guess which one admired me. Just for fun, I clicked a couple pictures to guess. After I clicked the pictures I checked my "People I Admire" section and there were all the pictures of the guys I clicked on. I didn't click anywhere that said "Admire Him" or anything like that. So now all these guys think I think they're hot. Great.

I checked out another section of the site called "Matches". That's the place where you can find your match, based upon the information in their little "about me" blurb. Just for fun, I searched within 15 miles of me. Emo boy, emo boy, redneck, picture of an 18-year-old guy that looks like he's really 30, and another, and another, emo boy whose picture looks like it was cut straight out of a magazine...

So I did what I usually do with those stupid Web sites that I have no interest in. I ignored it. Well, after I told my sister that this site didn't look like a place she should be hanging out. Oh, but I'm just an overprotective big sister.

 I'm the oldest of four kids. The next oldest of my siblings is nine years younger than me. There are fourteen years separating the youngest and me. Of course I'm going to be an overprotective big sister. I helped to raise them. I've always looked out for them and protected them, much like a parent would. Granted, my parents were there and they still are and they're doing their parental duties and stuff, but you know what I mean. The kids have the sibling rivalry thing amongst themselves, but in age I'm so far away that I'm everybody's favorite and I'm the cool one. Plus, I'm the adult. They're my baby sisters and I feel a sense of responsibility for them.

When I recently found out that the middle kid has been up to no good lately I decided to investigate. At least I heard it from her, I thought. At least she tells me what she's doing. In my investigation I found some disturbing information, but that's a whole other story. While I was busy doing that I decided to log onto my MyYearbook account and see what was going on there. Well, guess what. My 13-year-old sister has 103 friends. Only two of them are people she knows irl (in real life). Who are the rest? Boys. Boys from all over. Boys with shirts off, boys with peach fuzz mustaches, boys with emo hair, boys who look like they could be men. I thought, well, how much harm can be done from talking to a boy in Alaska? Then the motherlyness kicked in and I wondered how many of those were really the kids in the pictures.

So I got to work.

I decided to start a new MyYearbook account. I found a picture of what I suppose she would think a cute boy on the Internet, made up a birthday, looked for a random zip code, and I was in business. I started sending out friend requests. I changed my zip code so I could search for my sister, and guess what. She was one of those stupid kids who didn't have her profile blocked from others and I didn't need her e-mail address to add her as a friend.

Within ten minutes I had 15 friends. All girls. Ten minutes later my sister added the fake me. Another ten minutes went by and I had an inbox full of friend requests. I received three comments on my fake picture. One girl (aged 15, according to her profile) said, "Damn, u iz sex." Another girl said, "sexy." Yet another girl said, "If u want me im all urs."

The messages started rolling in. One girl messaged me several times asking my age. I finally replied back and told her to check my page (it said I was 15). "Cool," she said. "im 11." Another girl whose profile said she was 15, and whose picture featured her bent over in front of the mirror wearing an extremely low cut shirt that showed everything God gave her - almost to the point where you could almost see her nipples - messaged me and said, "lol not to sound weird or nething but ur hot." Now, mind you, all I did was send out the requests. I didn't send a single one of those girls a message. Several of them kept writing over and over and over because I wouldn't reply. One message said, "u seem like a really nice guy". Really? Wanna know what my profile said? Here's how I filled out my "what I'm up to" section:

Joey hates life; I'm reading who needs books?; I'm dating I'm single baby; I'm lusting after a hot chic; I'm annoyed at my fuckin mom; etc...

Does that sound like someone you would want to get to know?

So when my sister added me I sent her a message. "hey wats up?" She replied without looking at my profile at all (you can see who checks out your profile). Basically it was just a hey, how you doin'? conversation. But still! Why didn't she look at my profile at least before she replied? And why was she talking to a stranger?

Then - this is where it gets really good - I happened to find a girl I knew from back home who is about my sister's age, a little older. I added her. She sent me a "hey wats up" message. I told her not much then she wrote back again. "hey i have a ? is that really u in ur default?"

How did she find out? I wondered. Is she just really smart or something? So I checked her page and went through her list of a hundred or so friends. Guess what I found. I found another boy with the same exact picture as me. My first instinct was to fly all the way home, find the girl and give her a big hug and tell her good job, way to pay attention. But then I started wondering about that other "boy". Was he indeed who he pretended to be? Or did he, like me, start a fake account? And if so, what were his intentions?

Then I checked out some of her other friends' pics. Fifty per cent of them looked like model pictures pulled off the same Web site where I got my pic (something about emo boys at blogspot.com or something like that).

I want to tell this little girl to be more careful. I want to tell her, hey, it's me. Remember? From church? Yeah, so be careful with who you let into your circle. Be careful with the information you give out. Set your profile to where only people who know your e-mail can add you. And good job on paying attention. And I want to tell the girl with the boobs hanging out that she's too young to be advertising her body like that (not that you should do it when you're older, you know what I mean). I want to tell her to be smart. I want to find out who her parents are and ask them if they know what their daughter is up to on the Internet. I want to fly home and and ask my sister face-to-face just what the hell does she think she's doing. She doesn't have a slutty picture on there, but she doesn't need to for a predator to be interested. A predator has all he needs in order to find her. He has her hometown, her picture, her interests. A little bit of research will tell him it's a small town. Her status update will tell him she hangs out at the library a lot. And bam.

I'm incredibly disheartened and horribly disturbed. Don't these kids get it pounded into their heads enough that they need to be aware of online predators and not to talk to strangers and to keep their information private? Obviously not.

 So once again, as if you haven't heard it enough, keep your kids safe online. Know what they're doing. Know who they are friends with. It's impossible to monitor their Internet access all the time because they have phones, their friends have computers, and libraries and schools have computers. Get your child's password. I have my sister's, little does she know. Thankfully her password is the same to everything and it took only a little bit of snoop work to get her MyYearbook password which she had different from everything else. All I had to do was to hit "forgot my password" and had it e-mailed to her address which I had the password for. In my sister's case, all her other networking profiles are kept private except for MyYearbook. Granted, MySpace and Facebook can be just as dangerous, but I find MyYearbook to be especially dangerous because of how easy it is to hook up with someone. My sister thought she was safe to have her profile open on MyYearbook because I never log into mine. Psh. Guess she doesn't know that my investigative reporter experience taught me more than just writing.

I can't stress it enough. Know what your kids are doing on the Internet. Yes, it may be sneaky to log into their accounts, but they're kids! They don't have rights to privacy when it comes to their own well-being. Obviously they aren't smart enough to know that they're playing with fire, or maybe they don't care. Or maybe, like everyone says after something awful happens to them, "I never thought it would happen to me. This is the kind of thing that happens to other people..." 

So don't be afraid to snoop around. Don't be afraid to do your research. Don't be afraid of making your child hate you. I'd much rather have my little sister hate me for a couple years than to have her wind up in the back of a van with a strange man.