MySpace Caves- Turns In Sex Offenders

I wrote last week that MySpace was going to face some embarrassment over a request by States Attorneys General to turn over data that their sex offender identification program had found.  I predicted that the software was either not working up to snuff or it would look like they were protecting criminals on their site.

It turns out that MySpace was only “looking for the right way” to turn the data over.  Yeah right.  But they now have a legal method to report what their sex offender program is catching.

From Reuters here:

MySpace said on Monday it reached an accord with eight U.S. state attorneys general and has worked out a legal mechanism to hand over information on convicted sex offenders found on its service.
 
Last week, a coalition of U.S. law enforcement authorities criticized the service for not divulging information from profiles of convicted sex offenders on MySpace.

MySpace said it had identified, blocked and deleted about 7,000 such profiles, but had initially declined to hand over the information immediately, citing a disclosure law barring it from giving away the information without a court order.

By last Wednesday, MySpace and the attorneys general group reached an agreement.

MySpace officials said they had always intended to provide information to law enforcement officials, but were trying to work out a legal process for handing over the information.

MySpace had no choice but to hand it over.  Otherwise they would have faced lots of lawsuits and scrutiny of their internal practices.  This decision may also alleviate future complaints from lawsuits that wish to claim that MySpace has not gone far enough to protect children from online predators.

I still say they need to go to a verified identity system-  not just an age verification system.  Law enforcement and MySpace should know exactly who is using their service because the cloak of anonymity is a criminal’s best friend.  One way they could do this is to go to a pay service.