Ken Prillaman was fortunate. He found out in time.

His stepdaughter, 13 at the time, was adopting a new persona on her myspace page, and this new persona was attracting the wrong sort of attention.

Ken and Debbie Prillaman were shown the younger daughter’s myspace page by her older sister, and they were shocked by what they saw. A tough, sexy, virtual version of their 13-year old stared back at them, surrounded by 572 “friends,” many of whom were older males who boasted about guns, drugs, and sex.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, this was a wake-up moment for the couple, who had little knowledge of social networking sites, or the way that they were used by people like their daughter, or the men that the Hennepin Country Deputy called about.

“The deputy wanted to interview our daughter about someone he thought she met at a festival in Rogers,” Debbie Prillaman said. Turns out the guy, who was e-mailing her daughter, was 17 years old and under a court order not to contact any girls under age 15, the couple said.
—Jim Adams, Star Tribune

Luckily the warnings were received in time, and the Prillamans actively protected their daughter from the 17-year old and an older, more muscle-bound man who had manipulated her into inviting him into their home.

Ken Prillaman is now promoting online safety, talking to churches and schools about how to protect their children from predators and other dangers online.

Ken’s story is exactly why we made our flagship software, Safe Eyes, capable of monitoring social netowrks like myspace and facebook. The reality is that 93 percent of youth aged 12-17 surveyed in 2006 use the internet (Source: Crimes Against Children Research Center), and 33 percent of cases of online sexual solicitation in the study were initiated through social networking sites. With our monitoring system, parents receive reports about what type of information their children are posting online, and get remote alerts through either text, email, or the phone when their kids are attempting to bypass the filter.

Filed under: Internet Safety News