[LINK] Myspace deletes sex offender registered members

[Jan Whitaker]

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/25/1987535.htm

MySpace deletes 29,000 sex offenders

MySpace has deleted 29,000 profiles of sex offenders off its website. 
(ABC News: Giulio Saggin)

The operators of the social networking website MySpace say they have 
detected and deleted 29,000 profiles belonging to convicted sex 
offenders on its service.

That is four times as many as the company said it had deleted in May this year.

The News Corporation-owned website attracts about 60 million visitors 
a month in the United States alone.

The new information was first revealed by US state authorities after 
MySpace turned over information on convicted sex offenders it had 
removed from the service.

"The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace -- 29,000 
and counting -- screams for action," Connecticut Attorney-General 
Richard Blumenthal said in a statement.

Mr Blumenthal, who led a coalition of state authorities to lobby 
MySpace for more stringent safeguards for minors, and other state 
Attorneys-General have demanded the service begin verifying a user's 
age and require parental permission for minors.

The minimum age to register on MySpace is 14.

"We're pleased that we've successfully identified and removed 
registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social 
networking sites follow our lead," MySpace chief security officer 
Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.

The service has come under attack over the past year after some of 
its young members fell prey to adult predators posing as minors. The 
families of several teenage girls sexually assaulted by MySpace 
members sued the service in January for failing to safeguard its young members.

Late last year, it struck a partnership with background verification 
company Sentinel Tech Holdings Corp to co-develop the first US 
national database of convicted sex offenders to make it easier to 
track offenders on the Internet.

Convicted sex offenders are required by law to register their contact 
information with local authorities. But the information has only been 
available on regional databases, making nationwide searches difficult.

As of May, there were about 600,000 registered sex offenders in the 
United States.

Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
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