Woman Falsely Labeled a Sex Offender by MySpace

May 25, 2007 — -- It took nearly a week for Jessica Davis to get an explanation about why MySpace had labeled her a sex offender and pulled her profile from the social networking Web site.

And when her name was finally cleared, it wasn't because of anything MySpace did.

"They have a corporate and a moral responsibility to me as far as coming up and saying, 'We messed up. This is going on. We're doing what we can to fix it,'" said the 29-year-old, newly engaged University of Colorado senior, a woman who confessed to losing her driver's license for careless driving a decade ago but insisted she'd never committed a crime to earn the status of sex offender.

But so far, she has yet to hear from MySpace, the social networking Web site owned by media conglomerate News Corp., which hosts more than 180 million profiles. Nearly a week ago, administrators sent her an e-mail that began "It has come to MySpace's attention that you are a registered sex offender in one or more jurisdictions." The note ended with an e-mail address saying Davis had 14 days to appeal.

She immediately rifled off a response under the subject line "You have the wrong person," asking to rectify the mix-up as quickly as possible.

Wednesday, she heard back from MySpace, receiving a form e-mail that flatly informed her "We do not keep records of removed profiles or images. If it was removed by MySpace it was because of a violation of our terms and conditions -- which can include a number of things (underage, inappropriate images, cyber bullying, spam, etc). Please review our terms for further assistance."

Davis initially contacted ABC News Tuesday after reading a story on ABCNEWS.com about an agreement reached between MySpace and a group of state attorneys general to share information from a database MySpace had built to prevent sex offenders from keeping online profiles. This was particularly troubling: First, she'd been falsely labeled by MySpace as a sex offender; now, the state of Colorado would have access to that designation.

MySpace hired Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to gain access to the Miami-based security company's specialized sex offender database late last year. The goal was to weed out the profiles of registered sex offenders who may use an online profile to solicit targets --