By Truman Lewis
ConsumerAffairs.com
December 6, 2006
Rupert Murdoch's MySpace.com is vowing it will clean up its space by using a database to identify and banish registered sex offenders through a program called Sentinel Safe.
"We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace," Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, said in a statement. "Sentinel Safe will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community."
The system is being developed by the online identity and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. amid complaints and investigations around the country.
Sentinel will build a "national, real-time searchable sex offender database" that will contain detailed background information on the 550,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, a news release states. It will be frequently updated with the names, ages, physical descriptions and distinguishing features such as scars and tattoos. MySpace hopes to have its database operational in 30 days, according to a press release issued by the company.
It will be the first national database that combines data from the nearly 50 state offender registries.
A 24-hour-a-day staff will monitor the database and remove MySpace profiles matching a registered sex offender, the release states. In the meantime, MySpace said it will delete any profile it can associate with a sex offender.
MySpace.com claims more than 125 million users nationwide.
The Sentinal Safe program addresses only known sex offenders with publicly available records. It does not address the problem of predators who have not yet been convicted of an offense.
A recent investigation in Florida illustrates the extent of the problem. The Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers found personal pages posted on MySpace by nine convicted sex offenders. MySpace removed six of the pages immediately and promised to investigate the others.
The article, "Are sex offenders invading MySpace?" published Monday in Scripps' Vero Beach Press Journal, Fort Pierce Tribune and Stuart/Port St. Lucie News, on TCPalm.com and also featured on WPTV was the culmination of a three-month investigation into local sex offenders on MySpace.
Of the almost two dozen pages on MySpace that matched names and cities of local sex offenders, law-enforcement officials confirmed nine were on Florida's sex offender registry and six others "were probably" on the list, officials said.
Just In Time
MySpace's new program may be just in time. Several states have been tightening oversight of the online dating industry, considering new laws that would, among other things, mandate criminal background checks on all those looking for love on the Internet.
New York is so far the only state that has a law regulating online dating sites, but six other states have introduced similar legislation mainly in the last year, according to the National Law Journal. They are California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Texas.
Lawmakers say the industry isn't doing enough to police itself and is putting vulnerable people at risk of meeting up with predators. Some states want to make criminal background checks mandatory while others want sites to alert surfers upfront that background checks on potential dates have not been done.
