Some Rethink Posting of Private Info

"Just like everything else that we've seen develop socially on the Internet, the social norms are the last thing to develop," he says. "It's what I refer to as the 'Wild West Syndrome.' It first gets settled and the laws and the norms get established."

For their part, the young leaders of the North American Federation of Temple Youth came up with a resolution asking members to think about how their postings reflect on themselves and the organization. They dubbed the ongoing project OurSpace _ and already, some people have deleted their MySpace pages, cleaned them up, or made them private.

"We're not against free speech or anything," Carson says. "We just want to educate ourselves, especially our leaders."

Hall, the Bentley College professor, says many young people don't realize how much information they're revealing online _ even when they think they're being careful.

Often, it happens in conversations they post on one another's pages _ details about their personal lives; information about in-person meetings; and sometimes even their class schedules.

"Because of this developmental sense of invincibility, we see the same risky behaviors unfolding in the virtual world that we see in the real world," Hall says.

Some teens, though, think adults worry too much _ and say that deleting too much personal information defeats the purpose of social networking.

"I know how annoying it is to look for people and it being impossible to find them," says Tyler Belden-England, a high school freshman in Pittsburgh who uses News Corp.'s MySpace and other sites.

His profiles include the name of his high school, for instance, so that friends can more easily track him down.

"But I'm not going to be stupid about it," he says. "We all get messages from weird old men who are like 'hi' _ but nobody replies to them."

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On the Net:

NFTY's OurSpace site: http://nfty.org/resources/ourspace

NBC's "The More You Know" campaign: http://www.themoreyouknow.com/forkids/kisafety.shtml

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Martha Irvine is a national writer specializing in coverage of people in their 20s and younger. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org