Small update on the situation; myspace seem to be reacting to this lawsuit with a couple of changes to how they operate. This article doesn't specifically mention the above lawsuit, but I imagine that their actions aren't entirely unrelated to it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/te...rssnyt&emc=rss
Quote:
MySpace to Add Restrictions to Protect Younger Teenagers
Starting next week, MySpace, the popular online hangout, will make it harder for strangers to send messages to younger teenagers.
The site, which has more than 70 million members, has been under pressure because members are frequently subjected to lewd or inappropriate messages and occasionally lured into dangerous real-world encounters.
The site will also stop showing advertisements for certain products — like online dating sites — to those under 18.
The owner of MySpace, the News Corporation, has been working to address concerns about the safety of the many teenage users of the site, while not clamping down on the freewheeling and flirtatious interchanges that are the source of its appeal.
Next week, the site will restrict how users over 18 can contact those aged 14 and 15. Older users sending a message asking to become friends with younger users will have to enter the recipients' actual first and last names or their e-mail addresses, rather than simply their user names.
The new policy still allows people under 18 to send messages to those under 16 without knowing their full names or e-mail addresses.
"A lot of 14- and 15-year-olds are friends in school with 16- and 17-year-olds," said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of News Corporation's Internet unit. "We want to balance the openness of our community with the interest of protecting the member."
Mr. Nigam declined to say how often strangers made such contact with people under 16 or whether such contacts figure into any of the cases where predators have used MySpace.
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.
Parry Aftab, the executive director of WiredSafety, a group that promotes online privacy for young people, dismissed the change in the contact rules for those under 16 as ineffectual.
"Kids that want to do the open stuff will set their ages to 16," she said. MySpace does not verify users' ages.
But Ms. Aftab praised the change that allows anyone to have a private profile. "I know adults who set their age to be 14," she said, "not to lure kids, but because they want their profiles private."
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I'm not sure that this will make much of a difference to anything. It seems to me that myspace are taking these actions, not because they expect to actually
achieve anything with them, but rather they want to be seen to be doing something.
All this will do is encourage people to lie about their ages. Older people posing as younger people, so that they can message younger people. And younger people posing as older people for similar reasons.
Ultimately I think that myspace is in a difficult position. If they do nothing, they will continue to be demonised by the media. But adding these pointless restictions is just going to irritate their users - the vast majority of whom, surprisingly enough, aren't actually rapists. It is likely to be irritating enough to drive a number of users users away into the arms of one of their rivals.