Murdoch's News Corp. Tries To Make MySpace Safer For Youths

[mandy]

When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad.

The good part: The site, where teens and twenty-somethings post pages about themselves and communicate with friends, already was popular, but it suddenly took off. In the last six months of 2005, MySpace's monthly traffic nearly doubled to 36 million users, making it the eighth-most-visited Web site in January...

The bad part: MySpace has become the focus of criticism from authorities, teachers and parents that children are exposed to risqué content and are preyed upon by sexual predators who meet them on the site...

[regic]

Update:

MySpace.com, the social networking Internet site popular with young people that has alarmed some parents and law enforcement officials concerned about sexual predators, announced yesterday that it was hiring a former federal prosecutor to be its first chief security officer...

Because of concern by parents and school and law enforcement officials that the site sometimes unwittingly makes young people vulnerable to pornographers or predators, the company has hired Hemanshu Nigam, director of consumer security outreach and child-safe computing at Microsoft, to oversee safety, education and privacy programs and law enforcement affairs.

Nigam has also served as a federal prosecutor of Internet child exploitation cases, an adviser to a Congressional commission on online child safety and an adviser to the White House on cyberstalking...

full article: http://news.com.com/MySpace.com+hires+of...g=nefd.top