Posted on Saturday, May 19 2007 @ 17:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Social networking site MySpace
announced this week that it has deleted a couple of thousand user profiles of convicted sex offenders. This action is part of a project to protect its young users from adult predators:
"We've made it clear we have a zero tolerance policy against convicted sex offenders," MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a phone interview on Tuesday. "We've said numerous times that the goal was to delete them."
Nigam said he was puzzled over the law enforcement authorities' actions on Monday, which he said would require MySpace to break the law.
"While numerous Attorneys General have asked us to turn the names of the sexual predators over to them, we are, unfortunately, prohibited by federal and state laws from doing so," Nigam said in a statement.
The AGs' demands preceded a hearing on Tuesday for the "Protect Children from Sexual Predators Act" in North Carolina, a bill backed by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper that requires online services such as MySpace to check the ages of members. Cooper is one of the eight AGs pushing MySpace to disclose the information.
