Should you be filtering online predators, prosecuting them, or monitoring their activities to analyze and model the behaviour of the rest of them? Seems like Kevin Poulsen's been data mining MySpace using the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Register, and the results are a Caught by Code MySpace Predator :"The automated script searched MySpace's 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders -- and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys.Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Of those, 497 are registered for sex crimes against children. In this group, six of them are listed as repeat offenders, though Lubrano's previous convictions were not in the registry, so this number may be low. At least 243 of the 497 have convictions in 2000 or later."
These findings indicate the offenders' confidence in MySpace's inability to take the simplest measure - match the publicly accessible data with its database - just in case. It's also worth mentioning that according to a recently released comScore analysis "more than half of MySpace visitors are now age 35 or older", and that according to their analysis, Facebook, and Xanga have much younger audiences, namely represent a top target for online predators.The most important issues however, remain the moment when a kid losses the communication with its "folks", and the huge amount of information kids share on any social networking site, thus unconsciously creating more contact points for the online predator.
Internet Safety for Kids - a presentation for adults, is full with handy tips for educating and building awareness on the problem.
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