Congress, MySpace Team Up to Fight Sexual Predators
January 30, 2007 — -- It's a parent's worst nightmare: Internet sexual predators stalking their children on popular Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, where visitors routinely post pictures of themselves and share their interests with a vast social network.
With the popularity of social networking sites exploding among teenagers, the perception is growing, particularly among parents, that these sites make children more vulnerable to Internet sexual predators.
MySpace is joining with a bipartisan group of representatives and senators, who introduced legislation in their respective chambers today, designed to force sex offenders to register their e-mails, instant message addresses or other Internet identifiers with the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry.
"Sexual predators will not be able to hide under the cloak of their email addresses anymore," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is co-sponsoring the Senate bill with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
The bill is called the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators (KIDS) Act of 2007.
The idea is that the Department of Justice would then share this information with administrators of social networking sites like MySpace.com, who would in turn compare the data with their users' profiles to identify online sexual predators.
The bill would also make it a crime, for the first time, for people over the age of 18 to lie about their age online for the purpose of engaging in sexual conduct with a child.
One in seven children who regularly use the Internet will be solicited for sex online, according to a 2006 study by the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
"It became clear as we tried to develop solutions to keep these guys off our site that they lie about their names and e-mail aliases, and there needed to be a ramification for that," said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, in an interview with ABC News.
MySpace.com has 150 million registered users, and is adding an additional 320,000 more each day. With 21 million of its users under the age of 18, the company says it has stepped up efforts to protect children from online sex offenders.
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