Downside to 'myspaceWatch'

MyspaceWatch is a simple tool barely in the “parental controls” category that monitors people’s use of just the one social network (it can’t help with kids’ accounts at Xanga, LiveJournal, MyYearbook, Hi5, etc.). As CNET points out, it’s free for monitoring one profile, $6 for up to five, and it only has 30 paying members (the rest of its 3,800 members use the free version). It’s really just a convenience tool, because it sends parents alerts about what they can see anyway on MySpace, its 24-year-old creator Alex Strand told CNET. The disturbing downside of a service like this is that anyone can use it. “Half of MySpacewatch members are parents, Strand estimates, while the other half are primarily people who monitor a friend's MySpace profiles, or their own. Despite some worry that MySpacewatch is used by predators to watch kids pages,” Strand told CNET he hoped not but didn’t know. Meanwhile, other MySpace-focused services KidQuery.com and Singlestat.us have folded for legal reasons, CNET adds.