If you've become a regular viewer of NBC's "To Catch A Predator," or even the local news, the word MySpace will send chilld up your parental spine. Here's some data that should comfort you and hopefully make you think twice before pulling the plug on your teen's MySpace account. At the same time, it should encourage you to have a sit down about what is appropriate to post online. From an article in the Miami Herald:

"A new study that examined adolescents' pages on MySpace.com suggests most teens are behaving responsibly in the type of information they post about their lives.

Authors of the unpublished study say there remain troubling findings, including 5 percent of youths on public MySpace pages posting pictures of themselves in bathing suits or underwear.

But more than 90 percent of the 1,475 teenagers in the study, who left their personal networking pages available for outsiders, did not include their full name in their personal profiles, noted the study co-authored by a South Florida professor. And the researchers found that 40 percent of teenagers in the MySpace study sample were keeping their pages completely off-limits to everyone but their friends, as the site allows....

The researchers examined 1,475 teenage MySpace pages, among millions left public:

- More than half of teenagers posted their pictures online and an unspecified number of others provided detailed physical descriptions of themselves. In addition to the 5 percent that posted pictures of themselves in bathing suits or underwear, another 15 percent had suggestive pictures of their friends in their online profiles.

- Only 4 percent of pages listed instant messaging contact information. One percent listed personal e-mail addresses and just a handful of teens listed their phone numbers.

- Though 90 percent of teenagers did not list full names, they left other identifying information, including their first names (40 percent), hometown (81 percent) and high school (28 percent).