MySpace, states agree on new child protections
— -- MySpace.com, under pressure from state attorneys general, announced Monday that it will take further steps to protect children from adult content and possible predators on its site.
The social-networking site, which has 70 million users monthly in the USA, agreed with 49 states and the District of Columbia to organize a task force to develop safety tools that could verify the age and identity of online users. It pledged to acknowledge complaints about content within 24 hours.
"We're asking the rest of the industry to join us," says Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer of MySpace and its parent company, Fox Interactive Media.
"This is an important agreement," says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. He says MySpace agreed not only to third-party monitoring but also to working on age-verification technology. He said MySpace and attorneys general have been talking for "a long time," prompted by cases of kids being solicited by predators they met online.
Texas didn't sign the agreement.
"We are concerned that the agreement is too vague," Greg Abbott, the state's attorney general, said in a letter to MySpace. He welcomed MySpace's "spirit of cooperation" but said networking sites won't adequately protect young users until they can verify ages.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper called MySpace's commitment to verify ages a "significant turnaround" and said the technology is feasible.
Nigam, however, says the technology is not currently available but the task force will spur more research.
MySpace, the largest social-networking site, had already tried to address safety concerns. In May, it launched a database that checks its users against sex-offender registries. At least 29,000 offenders were identified, and their MySpace profiles were deleted.
Nigam says it also reviews every new image and video that is uploaded, scans its site for at least 300 words that could identify underage users and automatically keeps the profiles of 14-
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