A new Net Safety Technical Task Force will be led by the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for World Wide Web & Society. The task force includes World Wide Web businesses, identity-authentication experts, nonprofit organizations, academics and technology companies. Among the members are AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), Second Life’s Linden Lab, Microsoft, Symantec, Verizon and Yahoo.

The task force will prepare quarterly reports and submit a final report at the end of the year. It intends to focus on identifying effective online safety tools and technologies, said Berkman Executive Director John Palfrey.

“The safety concerns posed by the World Wide Web are part and parcel of the safety concerns that arise in human interactions in the physical world,” Palfrey said. “These concerns are not rare to any one service or technology platform; they are shared by the companies that supply Net services and the individuals who use these services.”

An Industry Challenge

The

group is charged with the implementation of safety principles for social-networking sites that MySpace and the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia posed in a joint statement in January.

“The principles we have adopted set forth what the industry needs to strive toward to supply a safer online experience for teens,” said MySpace Chief safety measure Officer Hemanshu Nigam. “The Berkman Center’s past research on the challenges and opportunities offered by the Net makes it the ideal leader.”

The task force will review some of the authentication tools available for verifying age requirements “alongside whatever other techniques they can come up with, both things that exist right now and what they can hypothesize,” a spokesperson said.

Since few minors have credit cards or driver’s licenses, new identity-authentication tools must be developed. “We hope to see technology like that implemented on all social-networking sites,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha…

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