90,000 sex offenders removed from MySpace

IN A SHOCKING discovery MySpace has admitted identifying and consequently barring around 90,000 registered sex offenders ceasing their access to the site over the past two years.

The social notworking giant revealed yesterday to an investigative task force that the figures were in the 90,000s rather than the previously acknowledged 40,000.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a co-chairman of the task force of looking into sex offenders' use of social networking said, “This shocking revelation, resulting from our subpoena, provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators."

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly said in a statement that the site was cooperating with Blumenthal's office but that it had "not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook."

MySpace also reckons that it has “deployed social verification and powerful privacy rules that allow people to interact in a safer and more trusted environment.”

Back in 2007 the site commissioned background verification firm Sentinel Safe Tech Holdings in order to create a national database of sex offenders after several shocking reports of minors abducted by sex predators after using the site.

Prior to the creation of this database, any information on convicted sex offenders was only obtainable locally – this now makes life safer on and offline.

This latest technology enabled MySpace to identify the 90,000 users which were found to be registered sex offenders and gave it then the power to remove and block them from the site.

MySpace's Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said, "We can confirm that MySpace has removed these individuals from our site and is providing data about these offenders to any law enforcement agency including the Attorney General's in Connecticut.” μ

L'Inq
Reuters