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NEW YORK - News Corp.'s popular internet social network MySpace said today it will donate a national computer database on US sex offenders to the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.
Sex offender data is collected by individual state authorities. MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings Corp. developed a technology that combines close to 50 US state registries, aiming to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders.
MySpace has increased efforts to block convicted adult sex predators from the site, which is a meeting place for a large population of teens attracted to the service to share photos, blogs, music and videos.
In January, the families of five girls abducted by adults they met on MySpace sued the company for negligence.
The National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) said it will use the new database to help law enforcement in investigations. Its local alerts are now incorporated within MySpace.
"We've come a long way from just the milk carton," NCMEC President and Chief Executive Ernie Allen said in a phone interview, referring to a long-standing programme where pictures of abducted children appear on the side of milk cartons in the hopes a wider audience will recognize them.
MySpace struck a partnership with Sentinel in December to create the database and has been using it to identify, block or delete the accounts of known sex predators on its service, company executives said.
The database includes photo-matching software tools that can help authorities cross-reference photos or descriptions of predators against registered offenders, especially those who have failed to keep their registration up to date.
About 100,000 of the 600,000 offenders are so-called "non-compliant" cases, NCMEC's Allen said, making them difficult to track. A national database with the cooperation of authorities and businesses that operate online communities could help, he said.
Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at MySpace parent Fox Interactive Media, said the company was in discussions with other companies to use the database.
- REUTERS
