Yahoo! chat rooms to bar under-18 users
NEW YORK — Yahoo! Inc. said yesterday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older.The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning."This is about protecting kids," Bruning said.Spitzer said authorities did not have to resort to litigation. He said Yahoo!, "acting as a good corporate citizen...
WHAT ROLE DO CHAT ROOMS PLAY IN SEX ABUSE CASES?
Microsoft has announced, quite out of the blue, that it is closing down all its United Kingdom chat rooms on the Internet beginning Oct. 14. Other providers of Internet chat rooms are continuing their services for the moment, and Microsoft is not proposing to close down its American chat rooms; however, it is going to ask users for a credit card number and billing address before they can log on in America.Never having used a chat room myself, and indeed not being at all sure how you would...
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Some Yahoo Chat Rooms Shut After Firms Pull Ads
Yahoo Inc. has shut some Internet chat rooms after companies including PepsiCo Inc. and Georgia-Pacific Corp. pulled advertising, citing concerns that the sites were being used by adults to lure young children.State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., Georgia-Pacific and Pepsi said they pulled certain ads after being informed by a Texas television news station that the ads were being displayed to users of chat rooms covering topics such as pedophilia.Yahoo, the most-used Internet...
Evening Standard: Online chat rooms where paedophiles pose as children
CYBER chat rooms allow people of any age to enter into simultaneous conversations with others from anywhere in the world via personal computer.According to the latest figures, one in five young people enter any number of the internet's 100,000 chat rooms with one in 10 going on to meet their cyber pals face-to-face. But not being able to see who you talk to in cyber space has allowed paedophiles to pose as young boys and girls and enter teenage conversations.A recent...