MySpace to Target Sex Offender Profiles

MySpace has teamed with an identity and background verification company in an effort to identify profiles of registered sex offenders.

Leading social networking site MySpace has teamed with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to built Sentinel Safe, a new technology which will enable MySpace to identify and delete profiles of registered sex offenders, effectively barring them from the popular online destination.

“We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace,” said MySpace’s Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam, 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 creation of this first-of-its-kind real-time searchable database technology is a significant step to keep our members as safe as possible.”

Through the partnership, Sentinel will build a national, real-time queryable sex offender database with detailed information on more than half a million registered sex offenders in the United States, using information from both state and federal law enforcement agencies. The database will contain a number of particulars about convicted offenders, including their name, age, and physical characteristics like height, weight, eye and hair color, and any notable scars or tatoos.

MySpace plans to dedicate staff to monitoring its services for convicted sex offenders 24 hours a day, and remove any matching profiles from their community immediately.

MySpace’s Sentinel Safe initiative may be laudable at several levels—very few people would argue that working to keep convicted sex offenders out of a site like MySpace is probably a good thing. However, neither MySpace nor Sentinel have revealed any information or policies regarding the new system’s possibly misidentifying innocent MySpace users as convicted sex offenders, or how it would prevent registered sex offenders from creating a profile on the site using falsified personal data and pictures.

MySpace is also advocating for federal legislation which would require convicted sex offenders to register all their email addresses in a national sex offender database.