“It’s a great idea if they can do something. It’s time. I hope they can enforce it,” said Mary Jo Glon, of Edwardsburg, reacting to Monday’s announcement that social network MySpace has agreed to increase safety provisions.

MySpace reached an agreement with many states, including Indiana, to take significant steps to provide better security to protect youth on its Web site from sexual predators and to stop other misuse, officials said.

The plan, which may eventually include other social networks, was welcome news to local MySpace users, parents and a law enforcement official.

Glon has a son who is a high school senior and a MySpace user, but not a rabid one. She leaves most of the supervision to his stepfather, because of her lack of knowledge.

“I hope they can trace people,” she said in reference to the sexual predators parents worry about.

“Whatever they can do is good. But I hope they can do something about the pornography,” Glon added.

Faster responses to pornography and inappropriate content is one part of the agreement. Another is to sever any links between MySpace and pornographic Web sites.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Mitch Kajzer, commander of the St. Joseph County prosecutor’s High Tech Crimes Unit.

He praised MySpace as being the most responsive, in his experience, in responding to police requests for information.

“I like the private default settings for 16- and 17-year-olds,” added Kajzer, who specializes in undercover work tracking down Internet predators. “Very few kids look at security and use it.”

One who does is 18-year-old Penn High School senior Brianna Di Bari, who thinks students from her school have gotten a bum rap for giving out too much information.

“I think it’s a good idea. I personally have mine (her profile) on private. All my friends have theirs on private. I deny people (access) I don’t know. I try not to talk to people I don’t recognize that I have not met,” Di Bari said.

She explained from experience why she believes privacy is essential.

“People try to contact you and send you dirty stuff,” she said. “That’s why I stopped accepting things from people I didn’t know, because it was frustrating.”

She dealt with it herself because she didn’t want to go through the hassle of reporting it to MySpace.

The new agreement calls for MySpace to respond to such complaints within 72 hours and devote more resources to reviewing photos and discussion groups.

Emily Case, a Riley High School junior, said, “I think (the agreement) will probably help because you want it to be safer. I don’t like it when this random person wants to be my friend and I don’t know who they are.”

She recalled a time someone asked to be her friend simply because their first and middle names were the same. “I said, ‘I don’t even know you, I think not.’”

Case said her parents trust her and her one-year-younger sister on the Internet “because we don’t do anything to betray their trust.”

Case said her mom has Case’s password if she wants to randomly check on her or her friends. Eventually, her mom got her own MySpace page, Case said, which she uses to stay in touch with her own sister more than to check on her daughters.

“I suppose it’s a good idea,” commented Goshen resident David Hostetler, who was lukewarm about the security agreement.

He doesn’t worry too much about his two high-school-age sons on MySpace. “Most of their friends are local and they know them,” he said.

As with Di Bari, Case and Glon’s son, Hostetler said his sons use My Space to stay in contact with friends but aren’t on it all the time.

Newlywed Danisha Rouse, 19, of South Bend, said she uses MySpace a lot to stay in contact with her family in St. Louis.

“Kids under 16 should have their parents supervising them. I think it’s unsafe for kids,” she said. “They should have parental controls and send e-mails to parents, yet kids should be able to have their own privacy at the same time.”

Di Bari added that photos posted by “a lot younger kids and the people they talk to worry her. A lot of kids don’t know how dangerous it really is.”

Vince Powell, a 21-year-old Indiana University South Bend student and MySpace user for four years, said, “I think it’s a very good idea to definitely monitor the content of minor’s pages, including the photo content.”

Kajzer said, “I always tell parents to be very careful when posting photos. Best are group photos. You don’t know who is who.”

Once something is on the Internet anyone can have access, Kajzer added, noting photos sometimes reveal a lot of identifying information.

“What it comes down to is children being educated and parents educating and monitoring their children. It’s got to start in the home,” Kajzer emphasized.

Powell said MySpace should have more anti-phishing safeguards in place, too.

(Phishing is an attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in electronic communication.)

A few years ago, Powell said, “I had my MySpace password phished and then comments posted on other people’s sites that I didn’t write.”

Hackers were able to direct MySpace users to a lookalike Web site, he said, where the passwords were copied.

Hostetler said one of his sons mentioned having his password taken, but it did not seem to faze him.

Youths may be moving on to other sites, such as Facebook or Yearbook, Kajzer said.

“MySpace, who uses that?” Hostetler heard his 17-year-old ask recently.