Dr. Megan A. Moreno, the lead author of two studies about networking websites that were published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, began sending teenagers who posted personal information concerning drug abuse or their sex life on the MySpace site  messages warning them about their postings. Sending the messages as Dr.Meg, she was able to find, as part of one of her studies, that after she had warned the teens about the info they had given out, the latter became more likely to ponder what they revealed about themselves the following time.

One of the studies focused on 500 publicly available MySpace profiles that had been posted by people stating they were over the age of 18. The researchers discovered that more than half of those profiles contained „risk behavior information,” as they called it, which included writing about sex and alcohol use and even violence.

The second study entailed creating a MySpace page for Dr. Meg, who stated in her profile that she was a doctor. Afterwards, researchers looked for users who said their ages ranged from 18 to 20 and who had also posted information about sex activity and substance abuse.

The researchers then sent them all a note that warned about the risks of disclosing personal information of such nature, along with a link to a website about sexually transmitted diseases.

After three months, they found that 42 percent of those MySpace pages had been altered in order to no longer reveal the personal info concerning sex and drugs.

Posting such information on the web could easily result in the user coming to be a target for online predators or it could hinder their efforts of getting a job, if a future employee learns about their substance abuse issues.