Popular social networking site MySpace has recently announced the discovery and deletion of more than 29,000 accounts belonging to convicted sex offenders.
The number of online sexual predators that are lurking inside the social network probably in search for new victims is considerably larger than the number previously announced in May, of only 7,000. Currently, MySpace boasts with more than 179 million active profiles.
At the beginning of May, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper signed the letter, along with attorneys general from Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in which he requested MySpace to provide information on how many registered sex offenders are using the site, and where they live.
The social-networking site responded it would not hand over the required information without a search warrant since that would violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. But shortly after MySpace announced it had removed the profiles of thousands of convicted sex offenders from its website.
In order to indentify and delete the accounts from its website, MySpace has used a software called Sentinel Safe.
According to MySpace, the software program developed in 2006 by Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. and implemented on May 2, 2007, uses a range of informational factors, aggregated from a maze of state sex offender registries to identify registered sex offenders, after which their profiles are immediately deleted.
Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, along with AG Roy Cooper, published reports on Tuesday that confirm the discovery and deletion of more than 29,000 sex offenders. However, representatives of MySpace declined to comment on specific numbers, limiting their declarations only to mentioning that Sentinel Safe is working “24 hours a day”.
"We partnered with Sentinel Safe to build technology to remove registered sex offenders from our site," MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a written response to an AFP inquiry.
"Through this innovative technology, we're pleased that we've successfully identified and deleted these registered sex offenders and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead."
Blumenthal added that "The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace - 29,000 and counting - screams for action."
So was the public opinion outraged by MySpace’s lack of security that Illinois lawmakers were asked to ban access to social networking Web site from computers in public libraries and schools.
There are currently more than 600,000 sexual predators registered in the US, all of them being forced to announce the police when they move to another location and all of them having being forbidden to set online profiles on social networks.
