New York – The popular online hangout MySpace said Tuesday it will develop technologies to help block convicted sex offenders, the site’s latest attempt to address complaints about sexual predators and other dangers to teens.
MySpace is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build and deploy within 30 days a database that will contain the names and physical descriptions of convicted sex offenders in the United States. An automated system will search for matches between the database and MySpace user profiles. Employees will then delete any profiles that match.
Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have grown increasingly worried that teens are at risk on MySpace and other social-networking sites, which provide tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages.
About 12 percent of all My- Space visitors in October were under 18, according to comScore Media Metrix. The tracking company counts Americans who visit the site at least once in a given month, so the proportion of teens may be higher based on time spent.
The aim of such sites is for users to expand their circle of friends, and critics say those circles sometimes come to include sexual predators. Wired News said a recent investigation turned up hundreds of profiles for convicted sex offenders.
Forty-six states now maintain registries containing more than 550,000 convicted sex offenders, each with its own rules on what information the public may obtain, as well as when and what can be done with it.
“How do you analyze those different databases and analyze them against our, right now, 135 million user profiles?” said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer. “We came to the conclusion (that) there was absolutely no real way to do this in a real-time, scalable fashion.”
Instead, Sentinel will build a search tool for MySpace using data from aggregators such as LexisNexis’ Seisint unit, said John Cardillo, the Miami- based company’s chief executive. The database, to be updated monthly, will include details such as name, age, hair color, height, scars and tattoos.
