I belong to a dating site and have belonged to it for 2 years now.. I have had a great time there and made some friends.. A woman joined a few months back who doesn't like me and 3 other women on the site. She has become very abusive to us in the chat room to the point of being banned only to return under a new profile... she has had her ISP blocked now and has had a friend of hers with a different ISP make a profile for her. Today she posted a link to a myspace page that she has created with my pictures and the other ladies pictures that she took from the dating site. She has very sexualy explicit captions under our pictures. My question is... Is this legal? And if not what can be done about it.. it has already been reported both to Matchdoctor and Myspace.. it's still there.

Myspace has something on their site about that not being allowed. Keep emailing them until they remove it. I highly doubt that it is legal but you'd probably need a lawyer to do anything more than have the profiles deleted.

Thank you, Justcurious55... I appreciate your quick response

Technically, whatever you put on myspace is available to the public domain. Granted, what the woman is doing seems like defamation of character, but as justcurious says, you may have to go a bit of a distance to get it changed.

Try to continue e-mailing myspace people and see what happens.

I recently came across this site to help educate my children on cyberspace and hope it helps in some way:
Internet Safety: Cyber911 Emergency - Cyberstalking and Harassment

Unfortunately, regardless of her school letting the kids know about cyberspace etiquette and its dangers just recently, last week my daughter phoned me at work in tears and was obviously terrified as someone she didn't know sent her an msn message and knew her name. He also told her that he watched her walking home from school everyday and made some very frightening and threatening remarks.

Although it seemed possible it was one of the boys from her school playing an incredibly stupid prank (which turned out to be the case), I was seriously concerned at the time and made a series of frantic phone calls to kids homes, the police, and got in touch with her school the next morning. Thankfully the boy admitted he sent her the message - but what a lesson to have had to learn.

Thank you all for your help.. we have contacted Myspace about this matter.. what they want us to do is send them a pic of ourselves holding a sign that has MYSPACE.COM written across it. Can this be true? Is this the way that Myspace handles these types of complaints? It seems that anything that has anything of a sexual nature involved should be handled in a better way than this.

... are they serious?

I think... they're trying to use you guys as advertisement...

Oh yeah, that sounds like that is going to stop her. I would hope that My Space would be able to do something more than that. I don't have any advice about how to go about changing it or making it stop other than to say that when dealing with a bully, reacting to anything that they do or say is what they want you to do. Therefore, do the exact opposite of what they want you to do and eventually they will tire and give up. I know that it stinks that you have your picture and name dragged through the mud on these sites, but does it really matter what people on these sites think of you? You really don't know them other than to email back and forth. After a while, everyone else will see what is really going on and will have nothing more to do with her. This woman sounds as though she has a lot of problems and is going to lead a very miserable and lonely life. I hope you get this problem resolved!!

It may even possibly be a male? It was a good idea to have made friends with other women on the dating site for support. As Mom of 2 suggests, ignore this person and maybe even disappear from view for a while, until it's no longer an issue.

Sounds like a really awful thing to have happened.

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Originally Posted by frangipanis

Thankfully the boy admitted he sent her the message - but what a lesson to have had to learn.

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Please, please, please tell me this boy got into some serious trouble. The internet is making it so easy for people to just do 'whatever' and not even think twice about it. Like just because it's easy to access and worldwide and that everyone can get on it, somehow makes it Ok to say what you want, do what you want, stick anything up you want (including sticking pictures of other people up). And even worse with a younger generation that is growing up with the internet and some of this stuff just seeming "normal" to them.

BTW, surely you can set MSN (don't use it) to not accept messages from anyone that you don't know?

Thanks, and yes, it's kind of sad that it can be like that. I was at least relieved it was a boy from school who she knew and that he admitted what he had done, since it put my mind at rest and I imagine it won't happen again. And yep, he was given a good talking to.

What's scary is that I thought my daughter had better sense than what she showed at the time, since we had talked about not texting anyone she didn't know and I had been watching over her shoulder occasionally to make sure she was on the msn only talking to friends. It all looked fine to me, with lots of girly hearts and chatter.

It makes me wonder what else I could do? I know that some homes have shut down the internet because of what can happen (has happened to other people), but as she uses it for homework quite a bit and I need it for work, it's not a practical option. I also think there's a lot of positive internet usage that can encourage healthy relating and learning. I could take the computer cord to work and have her use the msn only when I'm around - except she enjoys chatting with her friends after school...

People can msn each other only if both parties accept the other person's email address. My daughter made the mistake of accepting the boy's fake identity email.

I can certainly sympathise with ariesgal. Having your photo linked into a dating site is encouraged, yet it hasn't worked out well for her.

I would not totally turn off your internet. You just have to set boundaries about the use of the internet and IMs. The rule in our house is that the kids cannot be on the computer without me looking over their shoulder at least every 5 minutes. Therefore, they are still able to do their homework and have a sense of some freedom, while I have the peace of mind that they are not going on any inappropriate sites. Now, the faster they get on the computer, then I may have a problem. But for now, I think this works well for us.

I know AOL has parental settings. And I think my cousin (he's much better with computers than me) said once that you can actually set any browser to basically have parental settings. That might help protect your children.

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Originally Posted by Mom of 2

the faster they get on the computer, then I may have a problem.

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That's definitely been a problem in our household :)

I occasionally pull the plug. I gave my daughter a little breathing space after her shock, to give her back a sense of personal power over her environment (geez, that was very pop-fizz talk) but yes, I agree, the reigns definitely need to be pulled in a little tighter. I'll start taking the cord to work and give her a half hour chance at msn after she's done the washing up.

Helpful discussion, thanks for the interest.

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Originally Posted by frangipanis

I occasionally pull the plug. I gave my daughter a little breathing space after her shock, to give her back a sense of personal power over her environment (geez, that was very pop-fizz talk) but yes, I agree, the reigns definitely need to be pulled in a little tighter. I'll start taking the cord to work and give her a half hour chance at msn after she's done the washing up.

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Little slow on this... been doing my taxes.

Thing is... there's always been dangers in the world. And we've always had to teach children to be careful about certain things. Like not going with anyone they don't know. And we can't watch them 24/7 so we hope they've learned, that we've taught them well, and eventually have to let go. There's nothing really different about the internet, except that it's newer & we haven't quite learned how to deal with it yet, and it's anonymous. But unknown people are still unknown people. And in the end, it still comes down to teaching as well as we can and hoping we brought them up right.

A former neighbor's kid was caught shoplifting. She was mostly a good kid, but an influential age, and kind of made a not-so-great friend who convinced her they could get away with shoplifting. Peer pressure. They got caught. When the neighbor got the call from the police, she basically told the guy to let her daughter have it and just scare the crap out of her. It was harsh and this girl spent most of the evening in tears. But in the end she knew what she'd done, was most definitely sorry, and I doubt seriously it'll ever happen again. She already knew it wasn't right because she'd been taught that, but she also learned what getting in serious trouble was.

Hopefully your daughter learned a very good lesson. In the end, you do the best you can and hope it pays off. You can't be there her whole life.

Nicely said, and fairly much how I see it as well. The lesson she learnt now is possibly all she needs to know to be careful in the future and certainly to not take everyone at face-value.