Internet Life

29.000 Sex Offenders Looking for Teens

They were all banned from MySpace

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

25th of July 2007, 08:47 GMT

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MySpace removed no less than 29,000 profiles from its social networking website that were flagged as sex offenders although the company officially said that 7,000 persons were banned from the service. This new number was discovered when the authorities required private information about the sex offenders straight from MySpace, the Reno Gazette Journal reports today.

If you make some simple math operations, it's clear that MySpace hosted no less than 5 percent of the total number of US sex offenders because - according to TechCrunch - 600.000 person names are stored in multiple databases.

"North Carolina's Roy Cooper is one of several attorneys general who recently demanded the News Corp.-owned Web site provide data on how many registered sex offenders were using the site, along with information about where they live. After initially withholding the information, citing federal privacy laws, MySpace began sharing the information in May after the states filed formal legal requests," Reno Gazette Journal reported today.

Although the MySpace officials were not available for comments, we start asking questions as to why did the social networking website representatives prefer to say they removed only 7,000 profiles from the page? Why did they lie? Probably, the main reason was that MySpace is one of the largest social websites on the Internet, with users of all ages and they didn't want to damage the service's image.

As TechCrunch reports, this is not the first move made by MySpace in order to protect young users from sex offenders and dangerous content. Some time ago, the social networking website removed dating adverts displayed in under-16 members' profiles and required over-18 year old users to enter a valid email and their full name in order to be able to be contacted. Meanwhile, MySpace continued to grow and I'm sure there are still numerous sex offenders hiding behind fake names or emails.

TAGS:

myspace | security | sex offenders | profile

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