By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Recently, Myspace.com has started promoting ads on in their site promoting online safety for children, warning them about sexual predators and the dangers of giving out personal info to strangers. These banner ads are part of a campaign started a couple years ago by the Ad Council and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“1 in 5 kids online is sexually solicited. Online predators know what they’re doing. Do you?” read the public service ads that began running Monday.

A division of News Corp., MySpace enables computer users to meet any of more than 60 million members. Users post searchable profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as where they live and what music they like.

But the Web site’s features and popularity with teens have raised concerns with authorities nationwide. There have been scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they met through the site. Source: Yahoo

We Say: They also hired a former federal prosecutor who specialized in online child exploitation cases, Hemanshu Nigam, who currently works at Microsoft as a director of child safe computing strategies. they are doing this to ease parents fears of sexual predators who target their children while on Myspace, and the other social networking sites such as Facebook and Xanga. While this is good, the only real way to protect your children is to be involved in their lives and what they are doing, and a program such as Teen Minder can help you immensely. You can’t see everything they do online, but it can.