MySpace announced today it will begin searching its 100 million-plus user list for people listed in a national database of sex offenders.
"We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace," said MySpace's Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam. "Sentinel Safe will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community. The creation of this first-of-its-kind real-time searchable database technology is a significant step to keep our members as safe as possible."
The whole first-of-its-kind, never-been-done-before, thank-God-the-technology-finally-exists thread runs throughout the press release. The language seems calculated to let MySpace escape responsibility for failing to police the sex offenders on its site prior to October, despite the availability of a free online registry demonstrably useful for exactly that purpose.
That said, Sentinel's database promises to be far more powerful than the DOJ registry. As described, it'll contain detailed information, including height, weight, eye and hair color, and the complete offense history of each offender -- all completely searchable. It'll be like a Google for sex offenders.
That leaves just one real disappointment in this announcement: How MySpace plans to use the data. With all that information at its disposal, and a "24-hour-a-day dedicated staff" using it, MySpace could seriously enhance its policing. Instead, the company is taking a sophisticated database and wielding it as a blunt instrument, simply banning everyone on the list from registering or keeping a MySpace account, regardless of who they are or what they did.
This is bad because, obviously, banning sex offenders won't keep them off MySpace: it'll just give them a reason to lie about their name or location, even if they aren't up to no good. Now sex offenders who want to stay on MySpace will all be using false information from the start.
MySpace is essentially refusing an opportunity to detect and imprison active repeat offenders, by moving the entire superset of ex-offenders into the shadows. Does the convicted pedophile have lots of teenagers on his friendslist? MySpace won't know, because he'll be under same veil of anonymity as the flashers and peeping toms.
We know there are some ex-sex offenders who attempt to recidivate from accounts opened under their real names. If you believe they will now stay off MySpace, then the company's policy is good for safety. But if you think they'll simply start spelling their name a little different or lying about their ZIP code, then MySpace has lost the chance to take them off the streets.
MySpace is taking the easy way out. It may be good PR to be able to say that you don't allow past sex offenders of any stripe on your website, but the company should keep its eye on the ball: the goal isn't to keep a former flasher from blogging about his cat, it's to keep current pedophiles from pursuing children. MySpace could tell the difference, if it wanted to. A smart policing effort would use the sex offender database as one of many data points in keeping the site safe. Sometimes zero-tolerance is really tolerance.
