According to his MySpace page, the 41-year-old San Bruno, California, resident is single, a Sagittarius, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, and counts an online stripper among his six friends. But California's online database of registered sex offenders offers a different profile of the same man: convictions for forced sodomy, oral sex and "lewd and lascivious acts" -- all with a person under the age of 14.
A 22-year-old man in San Francisco comes off as a typical college student on MySpace, professing a love for beat poetry, nature and obscure coffee house bands. His profile doesn't mention that he's a convicted child molester.
Wired News ran the names of randomly selected registered sex offenders in San Francisco and neighboring Sonoma County through MySpace's user search engine, and turned up no fewer than five men whose self-reported names, photographs, ages, astrological signs, locations and (in two instances) heights matched those of profiles on the state's online sex offender registry.
In two additional cases, the information posted on MySpace was sufficient to suggest a probable but not certain match. Repeated e-mails to all seven men through MySpace were not answered.
None of the men appeared to have minors listed on their MySpace friends list.
Assuming the profiles are authentic, the easily verified presence of registered sex offenders in the online community highlights the difficulties MySpace faces as it seeks to clean up its content and public image, while maintaining the flexibility and privacy that has drawn more than 70 million users to its website.
Over the past several months, MySpace.com has been hammered by media reports, portraying it as both a safe haven for sexual predators and a dangerous place for naïve teens who post personal, and potentially damaging, information for all the world to see. In response, the Rupert Murdoch-owned company has boosted its security and public relations efforts.
Last week it brought on Microsoft veteran Hemanshu (Hemu) Nigam to fill a new post of chief security officer, and launched an advertising campaign promoting online safety.
Already, one-third of MySpace's rapidly growing staff of 300 is dedicated to customer service and support, looking into images and profiles that potentially violate the site's terms of use. But with an astonishing 270,000 new users registering every day, and a thorny tangle of privacy and legal issues to navigate, MySpace doesn't aspire to keep tabs on everybody.
At the same time, when your company continuously pops up in the news because your service is allegedly being used by sexual predators to exploit teens, having registered sex offenders posting openly on your site just looks bad.
All but one of the offenders Wired News found on MySpace appear to have been convicted of engaging in some kind of sexual activity with a minor. The other, one of the two probable matches, is listed as having raped, penetrated with a foreign object, and engaged in oral sex with an unconscious person.
On MySpace, he's a Christian with a girlfriend and nearly 400 friends.
All of their online profiles, which understandably make no mention of their crimes, were surprisingly easy to find. The search was conducted over the course of a few hours and covered a very limited geographical area. Not every registered sex offender's name was checked. In many cases, profiles matching the name and location of listed offenders were found on MySpace, but the profile was too incomplete to determine a match.
But with five conclusive matches, the endeavor was a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack and pulling out a pin cushion.
Given that MySpace's user base is approaching the combined populations of California, Texas and New York, and the fact that 46 states have online sex offender databases, a more exhaustive search is not only possible, but would likely turn up many more registered sex offenders on the site.
On the surface, the ease with which these profiles can be located seems to undermine MySpace's claims to be cracking down on sex offenders on its servers. But even if the company wanted to use state sex offender registries as a MySpace blacklist, doing so may not be possible or even advisable.
For starters, a registered sex offender is not breaking the law just by participating on the site. (It's for this reason that we've chosen not to identify the ones we found by name.) While a judge may on occasion require a convicted sex offender to, for example, stay out of internet chat rooms or avoid playgrounds, that order ends once a sentence has been served. Afterward, under typical state laws, the perpetrator's only requirement is to register with law enforcement agencies annually, and upon changing residences, for the rest of his life.
"It's not against the law, to be on the site itself, no, unless they're prohibited by probation or parole," said inspector Jim Zerga of the San Francisco Police Department.
Nor are convicted sex offenders violating MySpace's rules by using the site. Felons of every stripe are as welcome. In fact, the only people not allowed on MySpace are those under the age of 14, those who provide false information or fail to maintain the accuracy of their profile, or people who use the service unlawfully.
And if MySpace decided to harvest state registries to boot convicted sex offenders, the move might even land the company in some legal hot water of its own.
"This information is put out there for people to help protect themselves and their families," said Mariam Bedrosian, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Justice, which maintains that state's online sex offender registry. "You can't use it to discriminate against housing and employment."
Would kicking registered sex offenders off a website be illegal? If a case was ever brought, it would be up to a judge to decide whether the action was in violation of Megan's Law -- the statute under which California's list is produced and distributed, according to Bedrosian.
In any event, such a crackdown would amount to little more than a public relations move, because it would only expel sex offenders who, in keeping with MySpace's terms, provide their real name, location and other personal information. Users can easily register and start using MySpace with a completely fake name, address, age and even e-mail address, and one suspects that many people who wish to use the site for ill purposes do just that.
It's a loophole the site has no intention of closing. The reason? Requiring personal verification, such as a credit card number, would create difficulties for the many rock bands, teenagers and non-U.S. users who belong to the community. In short, it would alienate large portions of the site's user base.
"One risk they take -- and I know they think about it -- is if they get overly protective kids will leave," said Larry Magid, a journalist who runs a number of internet safety education websites, including BlogSafety.com.
"MySpace is constantly engaged with local police and investigators regarding the safety of our users," Grossman wrote in an e-mail. "The company cooperates directly with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to swiftly and thoroughly address any issues affecting the safety of our users."
In many ways, MySpace finds itself in the same situation as eBay in the late 1990s, when it had grown well beyond its own capacity to police itself, and fraud was rampant due to the resulting security loopholes. EBay walked a fine line between punishing bad behavior and alienating its users, many of whom were drifting off to new competitors.
And if MySpace took the extreme step of forbidding registered sex offenders from using its site, what's to stop them from setting up camp at Xanga or Friendster or MyYearbook? Even in the impossible event that all the existing social networking sites became verifiably pervert-free, new sites and new applications would just spring up in their place, bringing about a whole new spate of security problems.
"I've been doing this since 1993, when I first wrote about internet safety," said Magid. "If you go back to that booklet, all of the threats are the same, all the issues are the same, but the venues have changed dramatically. Back then it was newsgroups. IRC was an issue, then chat rooms, instant messaging. Now nobody talks about chat and everybody talks about social networking.
"Five years from now we won't be talking about MySpace," Magid concludes. "I don't know what we'll be talking about, but it will be the same issue in a different venue."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,70675-0.html
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