MySpace.com Planning to Restrict Site Usage

By Linda Orlando

The website MySpace.com has experienced astounding growth since its launch in January 2004, becoming the second most popular website in the United States. Most of that growth has been fueled only by word of mouth, and the site now has about 87 million users, with about 25% of those users registered as minors.

MySpace offers a mix of features to appeal to all users, including games, message boards, and Web journals, so that younger visitors will be encouraged to click on many pages of the site, which is supported solely by advertising displayed prominently on each page. Users who are registered can create online profiles giving their gender, age, and city location. Full profiles describe their hobbies, schools, and any other personal data that a user chooses to provide to site viewers. Users can expand their circle of friends by connecting to specific other users, as well as meeting people randomly by keyword searches.

The site already prohibits youths age 13 and younger from creating accounts, and it displays only partial profiles for users who are registered as 14 or 15 years old, unless the person viewing the profile is already on their list of friends. However, the site has no mechanism for verifying that users are submitting their true age when registering. Therefore, adults can sign up as teens and request to join the friends list of any teenager, which would then enable them to view full profiles.

MySpace has come under fire repeatedly in recent months, drawing harsh criticism from parents, school officials, and law enforcement concerned that underage teens who spend time online at MySpace may fall victim to adult sexual predators. As a result, the website is planning to implement restrictions to their existing registration process, which will be announced on Wednesday and be put into effect next week.

MySpace will be tightening its ad-targeting technology to avoid the display of gambling and other adult-themed sites on profile pages of minors, and instead target public-service announcements to them. Under the new registration process, users who are 18 or older can no longer request to be on an underage friend’s list unless they know that person’s name or e-mail address. Any user can get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, but adults cannot request to be added to a younger person’s friends list to view the full profile.

The changes have been planned for a while, according to MySpace officials, and are unrelated to recent criticisms. A number of other safety-related measures enacted include the hiring of a former Microsoft executive and federal prosecutor as the company’s online safety chief. MySpace has already developed safety tips for all users and has dozens of employees monitoring the site 24 hours a day. But despite all these so-called "safety measures," there is still no way to verify that someone registering with the site is as old as they say they are. So these new rules cannot prevent an adult from registering as a 14-year-old and luring youngsters into divulging personal information.

"We take aggressive measures to protect our members," said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer. "But ultimately, Internet safety is a shared responsibility. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart Web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world."

Earlier this month a 16-year old Michigan girl tricked her parents into getting her a passport, then flew to the Mideast to be with a 25-year old man she met online at MySpace. The man sent her money to come to Israel so he could marry her, and she purchased tickets, flew to Tel Aviv, and checked into a hotel, without her parents knowing anything about it. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded the girl to turn around and come home. Just this week a 14-year-old Texas girl sued MySpace and News Corp. for $30 million, claiming that she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old user lied in his profile about being a senior on a football team to gain her trust and get her phone number.

MySpace "has got to take this seriously," said attorney Carl Barry, who is representing the girl and her mother. But wait a minute—doesn’t it seem like parents are the ones who should be taking this seriously?