MySpace Agrees to New Safety Measures

Found on Wired on Sunday, 13 January 2008
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Under mounting pressure from law enforcement and parents, MySpace agreed Monday to take steps to protect youngsters from online sexual predators and bullies, including searching for ways to better verify users' ages.

But Monday's announcement was short on specifics about how improvements would be carried out.

"Age verification requires that you have a database of kids and if you do, that database is available to hackers and anyone who can get into it."

MySpace said it was combing through sex offender registries to identify predators, who would then be kicked off the site. But sex offenders are unlikely to open an account under their real names, as are underage children.

"When people go on MySpace they lie about their age. Everyone lies about their age," the sixth-grader said. "You just put an age and a date and you just put it on there."

MySpace said it is in the process of creating a database where parents can submit children's e-mail addresses to prevent their children from setting up profiles.

Nice, I can already see the next headlines: "MySpace hacked. Children e-mail database stolen". Looks like some people have to learn the hard way about the Internet. All children are in a database and cannot lie about their age? Well fun, I'll lie about my country. Or about my name. Or I'll quickly get a new, free e-mail address. The same works for the predators too. To think that they will sign up with their real name and a possibly registered e-mail address is, well, naive. Besides, those 200 million accounts exist because people can sign up easily (and multiple times); if you have to go through a long verification (possibly involving snail mail), you'll think twice about it.