Creeps on Myspace is something that many parents fear....

It's possible to do a search to find sex offenders on MySpace

The unknown of 'who is who' on MySpace is a very frightening thought for many parents and is not something that should be taken lightly. In the internet age there have been tons of perverts and creeps who are preying on the innocent children around the world and a child of any age, regardless of gender can be targeted.  

So how do you protect your child?  That is a very long discussion so instead the issue becomes how can you possibly catch a creep online to protect the masses who surf around unsuspecting of who everyone is?  Well according to a Wired report by Kevin Poulsen it is possible to do an automated search comparing the sex offender registries to the users on MySpace.  

Kevin admits that this process takes a very long time to complete, and does result in a very large number of false positives.  However, he claims that the script is good for doing some of the preliminary work associated with protecting the innocent from the cyber creeps who are roaming.  

In the wired article, Kevin has even offered a BSD license of the software so that users can use the software themselves, improve upon it, and offer suggestions on how it can be improved.  The goal is for this to become something that takes a lot less human interaction and products a much lower number of false positives.  

While we are discussing false positives, it is very important to note that in the software he created he admits there were false positives in the thousands that the software found.  However, using a human to compare the data confirmed that they were not true positives that required attention any further.  This makes it very important to accurately inspect the information and ensure that someone is not accused whom is actually innocent.  

From the research that Kevin did, it was reported that one suspect was actually arrested for attempted child endangerment charges because of information that was found on their MySpace page.  The criminal mentioned in Kevin’s article is Andrew Lubrano, who was arrested by the New York Suffolk County Police Department.  This is a huge shocker to some parents who just assume that MySpace is perfectly safe.  

Whether it is really safe or not is still completely unknown.  However, it is so easy for people to join there are sure to be some bad apples in the bunch.  The process of running the software has three parts that must be fully completed before it is considered a successful run.  The first part of the software queries the Department of Justices servers using a zip code search for registered sex offenders.

Once this process is completed a table must be made with the results from the Department of Justice search, this itself can take up to 3 days to gather the results from the DOJ servers.  This is a large majority of the time.  From here, the information is then searched on MySpace.  The software simply enters the name and zip code of each offender and starts tracking the pages that are returned.

From here, it is up to a human eye to start comparing pictures and other relevant information on the site to determine if it is a match or a false positive.  This is a very lengthy process from start to finish that takes a very long time.   Whether it is reasonable to do on a continuous basis or not is still unknown, but there is much support for helping keep people safe from the creeps who tend to prey on the innocent people they find online.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed