Teenagers Blog Away Without Parent's Knowledge

Posted on May 2, 2005

MSNBC.com reports that many teens are actively blogging and posting personal information and photos in their blogs without telling their parents.

With that, Marcy made a discovery thousands of parents around the country are making -- teenagers are among the most active Internet bloggers, and many are posting pictures, names, addresses, schools, even phone numbers, almost always without their parent's knowledge.

MySpace.com was singled out a source for blogs where teens post personal information including pictures of themselves. It is not unusual for teens to have blogs. Half of all the blogs on the Internet are run by teenagers:

About half of all blogs are authored by teenagers, according to a 2003 study by Perseus Development Corp.; and according to comScore Media Metrix, a majority of the top 15 sites visited by teens 17 and under in January 2005 were either blogs or social networking sites.

MySpace.com has 13 million members and does not allow users under the age of 16 -- although some teens lie and say they are 16 and then later admit to being under 16 in their blog according the MSNBC.com article. LiveJournal.com does allow teenagers from age 13 to 16 to have online journals and MSNBC.com reported that 400,000 of LiveJournal.com's 7 million users are under 16. Parents are faced with a dilemma in their decision to limit blogging. If parents try and deny their teenager a blog (which would be difficult) they cut off part of their child's social network and stop them from writing and interacting with new communication tools. However, if the teens continue to blog they may expose more personal information about themselves and/or the family.