According to an article made by News.com, teens are not revealing nearly as much information to the public as we thought. It says that "66 percent [of teens on MySpace] say that their information is not visible to all Internet users."
It further goes on to say that most teens use the site for meeting up and contacting friends, especially when schedules are busy.
I don't know quite what to think. There has obviously been a sterotype that teens share their personal information willy-nilly across the whole interent, which this study shows is not entirely true. This sounds positive; teens who are only talking and sharing information to people they know online have much less risk of getting molested or some other stuff that can be linked to MySpace.
However, I think there's a conversely negative effect on this, too. For one thing, people will make strange friends on MySpace. People that don't even know each other or can verify the people are who they say they are, are added to "friends" profile on MySpace. Only sharing personal information to these "friends" may not even be the safest thing to do.
My point is that there comes a point where something is so public that it's safe. For example, public message boards are not where rapists try to get victims; the discussions usually take place on "private" chatrooms and msn. I have a funny feeling this is sort of what's happening on MySpace, because it can be so private that no one else can see what's going on, and that can end up being far more dangerous.
Obviously I am no child-safety expert, nor do I want to be one. And not exposing your personal information to the whole world will have mostly positive effects. The funny thing is that a recent survery observed the actual reasons why teens go on MySpace: girls use it as a social place, boys use it to flirt. Which is not suprising, considering that girls tend to be more social than boys. So it's fairly obvious that MySpace is aimed more at girls than boys.
Ah well, I got pretty off-topic there...
Just don't get lulled into the false-sense of security you think you have when your teen only shows personal information to "friends".