MySpace Not Alone in Fight Against Online Predators
To most parents, MySpace is not just a Web site; it’s competition. The site vies with them for time with their teens. On occasion, it’s also a Web site where sex offenders trawl for victims.
This week, MySpace is striking back, announcing a broad program in partnership with Sentinel Tech, an expert in online background checks, to screen MySpace users against 46 sex offender registries.
Positives — that is, MySpace users who match an entry in a sex offender database — will be removed from MySpace, helping the site rid itself of predators.
Known as Sentinel Safe, the MySpace/Sentinel project will develop what MySpace claims is the largest sex offender database ever, with more than half a million names. It will also be the first project to link the database systems of different states into a national, unified system.
Playing Catch-Up?
While MySpace is making headlines for pushing high-tech tools to their limits, the three-year old site, an upstart that’s taken the social-networking world by storm, is far from alone. Indeed, it’s playing catch-up with some of the competition.
For example, take AOL. The granddaddy of online communities has a host of high-tech ways to inoculate its Web sites, chat rooms, e-mail routes, and instant messaging from bad behavior. These include special content for kids and teens, teams that monitor kids’ chat rooms to look for suggestive language or disclosures of private information, and free parental control software that sends parents a report card of their kids’ online activity.
But there’s more. According to AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, AOL has software that screens any image sent to or from an AOL e-mail account for known patterns of child porn.
“We don’t actually scan the image itself,” said Weinstein. “It’s a mathematical process.” Software adds up the ones and zeroes that comprise a digital image to obtain…
