More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.

Facebook has added a Facebook Panic button application, following an agreement with (read as capitulation to, but we don’t mean that pejoratively) UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). The way that it works, at least in theory, is that it provides an easy way for young people on Facebook (and their parents) to report suspicious activity – by which we mean activity that may be aimed at luring, stalking, or bullying minors – to both Facebook and CEOP.

Stories are swirling over a girl named Emma who allegedly committed suicide on Christmas eve, 2008, as the result of some Facebook status update messages aimed at her. The status update messages directed at “Emma” are indeed horrible (see image below), however, there is doubt that a girl named Emma actually committed suicide on Christmas eve, or at all, even though a Facebook fan page entitled “Teenager committed SUICIDE because of THIS status update – Leaked from 2008” would have you think otherwise. However, the story does match quite closely the suicide of Phoebe Prince, which occurred this January.

Amber Duick was minding her own business when she suddenly started receiving a series of scary emails from a Sebastian Bowler – a stranger who seemed not only to know who Duick is, but to know how to find her. Indeed, he knew her previous address, and generally where she lives now, and, he said, he was coming to her house to hide from the police. Amber was terrified – even sleeping with a machete by her bed and insisting that her boyfriend keep mace and a club by his side. Terrified, that is, until she learned that it was all an elaborate marketing stunt being carried out on behalf of Toyota. Toyota’s response? She asked for it, they say, by opting in to their marketing emails.

One would think that after the Megan Meier suicide and the case and cyberbullying law that flowed therefrom, that no right-thinking adult would be horrid – or foolish – fake posts on a public forum targetted at harrassing a teenager. But that’s just what Elizabeth Thrasher did, and to add to the unbelievable nature of her actions, she is from the same area of Missouri as Megan Meier’s tormentor!

If you were among those who were upset by the criminal conviction of Lori Drew – the mother behind the MySpace incident that lead to the suicide of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier – you are either about to be relieved, or outraged, depending on where you stood on the case. Lori Drew, who had been facing felony charges due to her involvement in the case, received, instead, three misdemeanor convictions. Now a Federal court is overturning those convictions.

The case against Lori Drew, the woman who was involved in the creation of a fake MySpace character that eventually lead to the suicide of troubled teen Megan Meier, who was the target of Drew’s charade, has concluded, and the Internet is in an uproar over the verdict.

Lori Drew, the woman who pretended to be a teenaged boy named Josh Evans on MySpace, for the sole purpose of harrassing teen Megan Meier – which lead to Megan Meier’s suicide – and who was arraigned and charged in Federal court in May, has pleaded “not guilty”.

Lori Drew, the Missouri mother who posed on MySpace as ‘Josh’, a 16-year-old boy, drawing 13-year-old Megan Meier into a fraudulent and faux relationship that ended tragically with Megan Meier taking her own life, has been named in a federal indictment and summoned to appear in US District Court in Los Angeles in June.

Concerned about the general increase in online crime, cyber-bullying, and sex offenders preying on underaged children, the state of Virginia has become the first to mandate that public schools offer Internet safety classes to all grade levels.

Lori Drew, the woman who was the adult involved in the cyber harassment and cyber bullying of Missouri teen Megan Meier, which ultimately led to Megan hanging herself in November, is the subject of a Grand Jury investigation which has been convened to determine whether Lori Drew can be charged with fraud for her fraudulant use of MySpace.

Thirteen year old Megan Meier committed suicide after being intentionally befriended and then dumped by someone she believed to be a new online friend named Josh Evans. In reality, Josh Evans – who said he was new to the neighborhood – turned out to be a MySpace account created by the mother of a schoolmate of Megan’s. Megan and the child had once been friends.

Network neutrality, laws requiring dating sites to perform background checks and ISPs to rat out their users, laws banning anonymous posting, and cyber bullying legislation. Is it all part of a move towards a nanny Internet?