A 13-year-old California boy was molested at computer camp by a man he met through the Internet. In Georgia, a 40-year-old car dealer was charged with raping a girl, 13, he befriended in an online chat session. And in Connecticut, the body of 13-year-old girl was found in a ravine after a man she met online confessed that he strangled her.
Such cases - and studies showing that as many as one in seven children are sexually solicited online - fuel concerns that the Internet provides an anonymous venue for sexual predators to lure children.
Receiving particular scrutiny are social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, Web sites increasingly popular among teenagers that allow users to create detailed personal profiles and exchange messages, photos and videos.
Such sites offer little guarantee, however, that a member's online identity matches the member's real identity, raising fears that children might pretend to be adults or that pedophiles could prey on youngsters under the guise of being a peer.
This week, MySpace and the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia announced that they will try to develop technology to verify the ages and identities of new members, limiting the ability of users to masquerade online.
But experts say it is difficult, if not impossible, to absolutely verify a person's identity online. Developing such a system, they said, presents significant hurdles, particularly if it is intended to verify the age of children.
"I just don't think there's a technological way that we know of to verify someone is a particular age only online," said Avi E. Rubin, technical director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute.
Several of the measures that MySpace and the attorneys general proposed to protect teenagers online are premised on verifying users' identities when they first sign up. For instance, MySpace plans to set profiles of 16- and 17-year-olds "private" by default and users over the age of 18 will be barred from browsing minors' profiles. Another proposal was to allow parents to submit their child's e-mail to a third-party registry to prevent it from being used to create a profile.
But putting restrictions on teenagers' profiles and limiting adult access to them doesn't guarantee that the teenager and adult didn't lie about their age in the first place, experts said. Nor does it prevent a child from creating a profile using an e-mail address that parents aren't aware of.
