well looks like WoW is less safe than SL for youngsters

http://www.ripten.com/2008/06/30/pedophile-uses-world-of-warcraft-to-meet-girls/

Looks like with all their checks and stuff, it still happens there.

Where I have yet to see reports of an actual instance of it happening in SL on either grid.

Just goes to show that no system will ever be able to stop misuse

1. I'm glad her father caught on before the girl flew to Australia, and he notified the proper authorities to catch the pedophile.

2. In Before The Lock

e.t.a.
3. All this managed without child-like avatars too...wonder how LL is going to look at this particular case, regarding policy on child AV's in SL...
...eh, won't make a difference - the two systems are entirely different worlds and mentalities.

Yes, shows a decent parent. And I think he got a lesson that nothing online is perfectly safe



To a point, the gnomes are the ones that were commonly used to play out age play scenarios.

But the reason I posted it is many recommend the same tools blizzard uses be applied to SL saying they are perfect and prevent all the stuff that can happen when kids are mixed with adults.

Good catch on this one Mort and thanks for bringing it to light, and yes, I seem to recall some rather vocal individuals who tout the miracles of WoW, and compare it to SL hand over fist in every argument.

Hence my number 2 item - ibtl

I can't wait to hear from them how this scenario is sooo different and somehow circumvented all of the perfect tools Blizzard has in place.

Well I didn't think blizzard had much in the way of tools to stop this from actually occuring and I never seen a claim of "perfect tools" from any company yet. How could you detect & stop these people talking in chat or on headsets?

But I can tell you one difference between WoW & SL, is in WoW they have verfication on who players are so they could track this guy down easily, in SL we don't.

Actually WoW has no account verification.

If he had been smart, he'd have:

A used a gmail account
B given false real world info
C used time cards

Strange, I always thought that SL had a pretty clear "18+" rule. Must have changed and Teen Grid is a mystery.

Now seriously, wouldn't it take lots of digging for information and for RL background to find an underaged user on the grid? Unless you gain access to the Teen grid by using false information about yourself, where you can actually expect to meet underaged users, I'd dare to say you are free to suspect to talk to an adult in the main grid, no matter if they display a kid avatar or a grown up.

Now I never checked out WoW, so I don't know whether it addresses both adults and teens or just mature players. But if it is open for both groups at once, it would be a totally different situation compared to SL and thereby cannot be easily compared.

The teen grid is iirc 13-17 and the main grid is 18+, and it is not unheard of for people to get onto the other grids. But LL reacts quickly to reports of it. (and kids that get on the main grid... are going to be using adult avatars, they don't want to use a childlike one.)

Wow is 13+ and mixes all ages.

awww, SL still has the more sophisticated potential childrapists (no offense, hehe).

Safety tip; Dun play a kid in WOW.

Mari
(Jes kiddin)

Don't play with a kid in WoW?

Not really... Somehow I've made a habit of it. (=_=)

I'm almost always in my child avatar, even on Orientation Island. I have found that people are more open to talking and asking about age because of this. Also, because of this, I have been a roadblock to a hand full of underagers getting inworld. They'll admit their age in open chat, and the response to my AR takes no more than a minute. (=_=)y

After which the go to the SL website, register for another account, and get back into world knowing better then to talk about their age. So the roadblock was rather temporary.

Really, I do not understand the fuzz about youngsters and SL. Yes there is porn, well half the internet is filled with porn. Up to the parents to keep an eye, if they mind their kids seeing things. Yes there is a potential risk in meeting an adult with wrong intentions. But they can meet such adults everywhere, from facebook to web chatboxes to msn.

It is up to the parents (and schools/governments) to point out the risks and have the kids use the internet responsible. Which will not mean they do not get to see porn, but it might prevent them from making dates with internet "friends", or stripping in front of webcams.

No matter how hard we try to keep kids out of SL or WoW or whatever, they will find a way. So we better concentrate on ways to keep them from meeting pedophiles.

Proper parenting is the only way to do it... but people want companies and the government to be parents...

That's the thing. There is a glut of alternative lifestyles here in SL. I'm quite aware of people that are here with 'wrong intentions'. And the seemingly popular reaction of laughing it off and saying "SL is not the place to find kids" doesn't work. (=_=)

I've been very public of my lifestyle here on the forum and inworld. I know tons of people that share my tastes and even take it to more extremes. It's one of the key reasons I'm most troubled by the presence of RL kids in SL. (>_<

While I would LOVE to see the Lindens lighten-up on the rules covering child avatars. I equally would LOVE to see them legitimately tighten-up on the age control/verification systems. (=_=)

Even after all I said... I can't agree more. (=_=)y

Too true.
Government and education do have a responsibility as well of course, and companies need to put effort in making things as safe as possible. But things are getting out of hand on that level.

In the last few years, as soon as someone speaks out the word pedophilia, everybody gets crazy. Its a keyword to get things going, it seems. And though I don't want to justify abuse in any way (!!) many actions taken seem totally out of proportion.

Even the (beta) age verification is stupid. They can check my credit card without much effort. So tell me, if my kid "borrows" my CC to verify for a SL account, don't you think he could do the same with my passport? I'm more worried about my CC then about my ID to be honest. But again, it's a measurement taken out of some weird public image panic. It is all about "face": Show the world you fight childporn, while the people in the highest places are the worst offenders....

That too.

I was kiddin, though, noting that in SL when people talk about RL underagers being in SL, it's the SL kids who become suspect. :-/



Me too. I don't waste time reporting that, neither.



Talk about gettin' what you pay for. :-/

Mari

There is grooming of youngsters on any internet site/virtual world where there is a capacity for them to communicate. The trick is having tools, education and processes with which to deal with them when they are there.

Groomers do not hang about on virtual corners or act in any other subverted way publicly, they will find a slew of youngsters and ingratiate themselves, earning trust and testing boundaries, to whittle unsuitable youngsters down until they find the ones best suited to their needs. They will pose as a similarly troubled teen, an loner, someone who understands, and will garner trust and then and only then will they begin to work on their ultimate objective - abuse and overt use of trust and sometimes misplaced and confused teen emotions to get what they want.

Typically a groomer will be working with and keeping notes on a large group of users that they have identified as possibles, every chat is used to carefully extract, at times seemingly innocent information, until a picture is built up and the groomer and they can work to use that information.

A teen gives 4 pieces of seemingly irrelevant information to a groomer over a 6 week period of idle and seemingly innocuous chat - these will all have been noted down and will then form what could be very pertinent information about a teen.

What should happen is that the the parents should be taking a responsible view of the whereabouts of their child online. Would you let your 14 year old travel to the big city and wander wherever they wanted to? That's is exactly what most parents allow their kids to do online...

Such simple rules that parents can follow regarding the computer and frankly any technology the child/teen interacts with.

1. Keep the computer out of the kid's room.
2. Set up their computer with the screen visible to you.
3. Password the darned thing for younger kids.
4. Teach them the rules of the internet. (Same rules for RL! Don't talk to strangers, don't give out personal information, etc)
5. Don't use the damned things as a babysitting tool!

Start this at the youngest age possible and hopefully, it will be a habit by the time they're in their teens.

I agree.. it used to be that parents used to shout to their kids if they were upstairs being too noisy.. I wonder if anyone thinks the same if they are being too quiet?

Also .. I think parents have a duty to understand the technology their kids are using. We all joked about 7 year olds knowing how to programme a VCR, but the ability for a child to communicate with anyone, you would hope, would spur a parent on to learn how they do it so they can put safeguards in place.

So true. But some poor kids are, for a wide variety of different reasons, never going to get the protection they need from their parents. No matter how much we talk about what parents should do.

You're coming at this from the wrong angle, WoW allows adults and kids to freely mix. Second Life main grid is 18+. If the teen and main grids were merged then there would be issues such as the one you highlighted here. Fortunately the grids aren't mixed and hopefully they never will be.

Notice this person was caught. Real identity and addresses known.

No company can control what goes on between people, but in the case of wow there are a couple things happening. First you have real people with real addresses except in short trial accounts, where people can fake it and secondly they have chat./whisper records they can look at in a few minutes. And when someone is bad they are banned.

Blizzard also now it unveiling a USB plug-it-in, identity dongle and has had security software that scans your hard drive for botting or scamming software for a couple years.

There was a case last year where a older aussie woman was having an online affair with a underage boy from North Carolina and although charges were dismissed after she flew to meet the boy, spent more then a month in a US jail. She too was busted and the police werer waiting at the airport.

With SL a kid would be sold into slavery before LL would be able to figure out who was who, since it is easy for anyone to get anonymous account.

As it is set up currently SL could be a nice, anonymous interface, for those into Human Trafficking--human traffickers aren't just into children.

So now the white slavers are targeting SL? Oh come off it.

lol



"Follow the money,"--philosophy of the golden age of SL.


And in SL I should add, alot of people apparently might actually like this.