No they're not responsible, and I'm sick of people who are willing to give up all our freedoms, thinking that will keep children safe. The hell it will! Predators and pedophiles can get to children without the Internet. Parents need to watch when their kids are online. They need to know what information their kids are putting online. If you're watching, and someone IM's your child, you'll know! MySpace can't know who's going to contact whom, and not every pervert has a record, so they can't even do a background check on everyone and accurately prevent them all. MySpace is just the biggest and most popular, but there are a lot more out there.

Any service can be misused. Any tool can be used for good or for evil. You hurt the good when you try to remove the service or tool to get rid of the evil, and the evil will still be around.

It isn't just community sites. If you have a website and own your own domain name, unless you use a company that lets you hide your information using theirs instead, your ownership records are there for anyone to look up! If you post a family site with photos, you don't know who's looking at them. Your address and phone might be obtainable through online white pages. If someone pays for it, they can get a lot of information on you, legally.

There are phone party lines where predators might meet kids. A kid might give the person info over the phone.

I had a couple of pen pal ads in teen magazines like Bop and Tiger Beat (are they still around?) when I was a teen. Some of the people who responded to me were men seeking sex (and I mean adult men) and men in prison! Some even sent explicit photos.

The thing about places like MySpace is, we can use it as a tool to catch these guys. Parents need to be vigilant, and people who find guys (or women) doing stuff like this need to report them.

In a related news report last night, they talked with Mary Kay Latourneau (spelling?) and the boy, now a man, whom she'd had sex with while he was a minor and is now married to. They seem happy, but it's disgusting to me.