The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

MySpace stands firm on paedophile data pressure

You got a search warrant?

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

MySpace has refused to act on demands from eight US states that it hand over user data which they say will help catch predatory paedophiles.

Citing federal privacy laws, MySpace said the attorneys general who made the demand had not followed proper legal process. Security chief Hemanshu Nigam told AP: "We're truly disheartened that the attorney generals chose to send out a letter...when there was an existing legal process that could have been followed."

In the letter on Monday, North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania asked MySpace to provide information about registered sex offenders who use the site.

MySpace's legal department said a letter won't cut it, and under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act the attorney generals need to pony up with subpoenas, court orders, or search warrants if they want data.

Nigam said a recent trawl meant MySpace had "removed every registered sex offender that we identified out of our more than 175 million profiles". In December, it hired Sentinel Tech Holding to track its sex offender users, after a run of bad press over incidents involving the site.

"Everybody needs to get together and delete online predators," Nigam said. "The attorneys general's concerns and our concerns are exactly the same." ®

Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software

Latest Comments

Definition of a sex offender

According to the law, you can be a sex offender if you slept with a girl aged 15 years and 11 months whom you met in an over-18s-only nightclub.

You can also be a sex offender if you got caught taking a leak in an alleyway at night while all the public toilets were locked up.

And if you have ever received junk mail addressed to a former occupant of your home, or been refused credit because of the actions of a former occupant, you'll know why it's a bad idea to make lists of names and addresses of sex offenders available.

0
0

Title

Whoa hold on, what the preivous poste was saying is that to many parents have adbocated thier duty to protect thier kids.

you want a simple and effective way to p[roctect your kids from online preditors??

Dont let them have a computer in thier own room.

Have it out in the open were you can see what thier are doing. buy soft ware to block sites. Yes actualy monitor what your kids do.

If you are depending on the cops to ask my space to violate federal law to protect your kids then we got a problem. Yes that what this issue comes down to,

I've seen to many kids in the public system that are introuble cause momy wont deal with timmy. Coulimbine any one ??

0
0
Anonymous Coward

the problem is...

They are now putting some many people on sex offenders register that simply are young people having sex with other young people of approximately the same age, and in my honest opinion unless the circumstances are extraordinary they do not deserve to be classed as a sex offender, but of course we do seem to have witch hunts going on nowadays...

0
0

More from The Register

 breaking news
NSA PRISM-gate: Relax, GCHQ spooks 'keep us safe', says Cameron
Whatever they are up to, it's all above board, we're told
PRISM snitch claims NSA hacked Chinese targets since 2009
Snowden suddenly looks safer in Hong Kong after revelations
 breaking news
US chief spook: Look, we only want to spy on 6.66 BEELLLION of you
Americans assured they are not in the NSA's sights
Speech-to-text drives motorists to distraction
Will talking to you mean I crash into that car up ahead, Siri?
DHS warns of vulns in hospital medical equipment
Has your doctor's anasthesia machine been hacked?
 breaking news
Yes, maybe we should keep hackers in the clink for YEARS, mulls EU
Watch out black hats, they just might throw away the key
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Stupid Redmond kicked over our honeypots, wail white hats
Critical Java SE update due Tuesday fixes 40 flaws
And yes, most are remotely exploitable
NSA accused of new crimes ... against slideware
They may take our information but they cannot take our REFINED AESTHETICS