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“Social networking was a new playground for spammers,” explained David Poellhuber, president of Zerospam, a provider of professional e-mail filtering services. “It offered them a fresh crop of targets — mostly young people, tech-savvy people [who are] perhaps not so security-conscious.”

The fact is that the digital natives are probably more lax than the analog natives on privacy protection.”

“They have to use fake invites, they have to create fake profiles — they even have to use phishing techniques to get the user credentials and then actually take over the compromised accounts,” Poellhuber said. “But in the end, the reward is quite good because, since social networking is based on trust, they might very well have a larger response rate than they have with the traditional techniques.”

The Internet has challenged our desire for control from the beginning and that is a good thing. As we move forward with new social networking / knowledge building tools, we will trip over the problem of misguided and irresponsible use. But as Wesley Fryer (www.speedofcreativity.org) has said, "We have to let kids into the pool if we want them to learn to swim".