"This is a huge issue," Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says. "We know that Internet access, and particularly social-networking sites, are generation-sensitive, and the generations are a couple of years per cohort."
Ms. Stoddart said one of her biggest concerns is the amount of personal information being collected from children, and what is being done with that information.
The commissioner's office has set up a website tailored specifically for kids, aimed at informing them about privacy. The site also contains a section for parents.
"We're not kidding ourselves: maybe youth don't rush to a federal government website," Ms. Stoddart said. "But we're hoping the parents will read that."
In the United States, Attorney-General Michael Mukasey has commissioned an Internet safety task force to find better ways to verify the age of users.
The task force is looking at implementing age-verification technology from Microsoft and IBM on several sites and even opening the process of enshrining age restrictions in law, said John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who chairs the task force.
But determining the age of users is a complex problem without clear answers, Mr. Palfrey said.
"There's no way to stop people from getting on to the site at the front end, when they sign up," he said. "But I think there are ways we can improve the systems that work behind the scenes to find the underage kids and deter them from using sites where they shouldn't be."
For their part, social-networking sites continue to address the issue. Facebook and MySpace have overhauled their privacy settings to give members tighter control over who has access to their information, and MySpace has hired a security company to screen for sexual predators.
At Nexopia, staff are in daily contact with police across the country about reports they receive from users and unpaid site administrators. They've also helped police track dozens of teenage runaways by locating where they log in to their account.
But it's a hard balance to manage.
"It's a problem that isn't going away," Mr. Webster said. "The older generation has this engrained fear of the Internet. But these kids, and the generation that will follow, haven't been brought up with that … these sites are just as real as the school hallways."
With a report from Omar El Akkad in Ottawa
