MySpace's Sex Offenders Problem

MySpace, being one of the most popular social networking sites is always under fire on its efforts to combat known child offenders registering and using its database to find what they're looking for. The problem isn’t MySpace as a faciliator for such type of communications but the vast amounts of personal information -- future contact points -- kids publish about themselves online, not knowing that on the Internet anyone can be a dog and most importantly, parents loosing the emotional connection with their kids and making it easier for someone to break the ice and establish trust.

Several months ago, funded by nothing more but his common sense Kevin Poulsen gathered name data from the U.S public child offenders registry and found positive results with people -- thankfully -- stupid enough to use their real names. And while they wouldn't do it again the next time instead of making it easier to aggregate the data, a CAPTCHA to limit such automatic activities was implemented. Don't blame MySpace blame bureaucracy. Meanwhile, here's an article on U.S authorities demanding that MySpace provide data on identified and removed known child offenders -- they agreed :

"MySpace agreed Monday to provide the information to all states after some members of the group filed subpoenas or took other legal actions to demand it. The company said last week such efforts were required under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act before it could legally release the data."Different states are going about it different ways," said Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for Cooper, who filed a "civil investigative demand" for the information. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal used a subpoena that "compels this information right away - within hours, not weeks, without delay - because it is vital to protecting children," he said."

If protecting children is vital, remove the CAPTCHA so everyone knowing how to aggregate and tweak the data will come up with far more sophisticated stats than the ones currently available. Actual results too. Next time it would become harder to track them, so don’t count on measures like these instead, ensure naughty conversations aren’t taking place at all. Makes me wonder one thing - should you be filtering known child offenders on the Internet perhaps a futile attempt given the pseudo-personalities they could establish, or at the ISP level and put them under surveillance right from the very beginning? Of course child offenders should not have unmonitored access to the Internet so rethink the basics.

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Registered Sex Offenders on MySpace
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