MySpace deletes sex offenders

NEW YORK: Popular Internet social network MySpace said, it detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported.

The company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp, said in May it had deleted about 7,000 user profiles that belonged to convicted offenders. MySpace attracts about 60 million unique visitors monthly in the United States.

The new information was revealed by US authorities after MySpace turned over information on convicted sex offenders it had removed from the service.

General Richard Blumenthal, who led a coalition of state authorities to lobby MySpace for more stringent safeguards for minors, and other state AGs have demanded the service begin verifying a user’s age and require parental permission for minors.

The  minimum age to register on MySpace is 14. The service came under attack last year after some of its young members fell prey to adult predators posing as minors. The families of several teenage girls sued the service for failing to safeguard its young members.

Last year, it struck a partnership with background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings to develop the first US national database of convicted sex offenders so that its easy to track them on the Internet.

Convicted sex offenders are required by law to register their contact information with local authorities. But the information has only been available on regional databases, making nationwide searches of these offenders difficult.