Myspace sued, releases new teen protection rules

June 21, 2006 – 9:07 am

The success of MySpace continues to amaze everyone, but we now may be at the point where the party is definitely over. There are huge numbers of estimated child predators visiting the social networking site for teens, and one mother launched a massive $30 million lawsuit against MySpace after her daughter was raped by a man she met on the website. Casting another negative light after another teen headed to the Israel to marry a man in the West Bank.

MySpace had no policies in place to protect teens using their service. It’s not hard to imagine corporate lawyers are scrambling to cover the company’s back in the event of anymore horrific press coverage.

MySpace will also start to allow all members to designate their profiles as private and thus available only to their named list of friends. MySpace had allowed and encouraged those under 16 to set their profiles to be private, but profiles of anyone older than that have been available for any visitor to the site to read.

In reality, the current measures don’t seem like they’ll stop much from happening. The bigger concern is how obvious it appears to be that the company hasn’t dealt with these potential problems in that timely of a manner. Stories of massive infusions of predators have been reported for quite some time.

This shows us all one of the downsides of Web 2.0: over-trust of the user, especially while using “free services”. What binding agreement do you have with a user who’s using fake registration information in order to abuse your service? Sure the service has been scaled massively, but chinks in the armor are starting to appear.