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MySpace Asked to Identify Sex Offenders

by Tom Conlon on May 15, 2007 at 09:22 AM

MySpace Asked to Identify Sex OffendersThe attorneys general of North Carolina, Connecticut, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania have issued a letter to MySpace asking the social networking giant to supply a list of the registered sex offenders who use the site. According to a statement by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, the demand comes after law enforcement agencies in those states identified 200 cases of kids being "lured out of their home by predators they met on MySpace."

Unlike public chat rooms that can be patrolled by the fuzz, MySpace allows direct and private contact between predators and potential victims, making them harder to catch.

Unfortunately, when asked to turn over sex offenders in the past, MySpace has claimed that producing such a list would be impossible until there is national legislation requiring busted pervs to register all of their e-mail addresses. According to a Wired article from last year, however, this claim isn't entirely true. With no assistance from MySpace, Wired's reporter ran a program that compared MySpace members against a list of sex offenders in 46 states. The program was able to identify 744 confirmed sex offenders with profiles on the site.

Hopefully, this letter from the states will convince MySpace to clock a little overtime for the safety of its younger users.

From Newsvine

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Tags: child, children, myspace, networking, online, predator, social

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