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I was in Naperville, Illinois about two weeks ago for a cyberbullying summit sponsored by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.  The audience was comprised of select stakeholders in education, law enforcement, and technology industry.  The most relevant companies and constituencies were there.  Attorney General Lisa Madigan was on hand to kick the event off with some opening remarks.  Michelle Collins from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) followed with some general comments about cyberbullying and sexting and highlighted some of the efforts of the NCMEC in online safety education and prevention.  Next, I participated in a panel of experts along with Hemanshu Nigam from MySpace, Andrew Chaulk from the Vermont Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, and Nancy Willard from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use.  We each provided a short introduction to our background and initiatives, then opened it up to the audience for questions and discussion.  As expected, it was a great discussion.

During lunch, Sarah Migas from the Illinois AG’s office described their efforts to educate youth, parents, educators and others about online safety issues.  In the afternoon we all were broken up into smaller groups to discuss in depth a particular scenario.  My group (Go Red Team!) discussed a sexting case from a few months ago.  We brainstormed possible prevention and response solutions and then presented our analysis to the larger group as a whole.  All in all it was a great event.

It is essential to bring all of these players together on a regular basis to develop a coordinated community response to cyberbullying.  Having pretty much everyone at the table really made for some interesting discussions.  The Illinois AG’s office is very much ahead of the curve with respect to these issues.  Stay tuned for more great resources from this group in the future.

If you’ve logged into Facebook over the last few hours, you may have noticed an open letter from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.  The letter discusses forthcoming improvements to better safeguard the experience and participation of users on the site.  We at the Cyberbullying Research Center highly approve of these changes, and believe they will assist in reducing online harassment and youth vulnerability to victimization.

While they will be discussed in greater detail after the rollout, Zuckerberg indicated that regional networks will be eliminated, since many networks have thousands and millions of members and therefore allow more openness and visibility in profiles than may be preferred by some users.  Secondly, they will be consolidating all of the privacy and security settings into a few (or maybe even one?) page.  Currently, they are scattered across numerous screens, and I would say it takes users a solid 15-20 minutes to go through each screen and completely lock down their profile to their preferences. Finally, Facebook will allow us to control who out there sees any and every single individual piece of content (note, picture, video, etc.) you upload or create.  This is fantastic, and has been heavily requested for months now.

Facebook has impressed me with the granular level of control it has historically allowed individuals, and this feature will take social networking security to the next level.  Presumably, their privacy initiatives and mechanisms will also serve as a model for other Web 2.0 sites to emulate.