MySpace Moves To Protect Teenagers

MySpace moves quickly after being slapped with a lawsuit claiming 30 million by a teenager, molested by a contact she made in MySpace. MySpace will adopt a series of measures next week to make it harder for strangers to send messages to younger teenagers.

MySpace, which has more than 70 million members, has been under pressure for quite sometime because members are frequently subjected to lewd or inappropriate messages and occasionally lured into dangerous real-world encounters.

MySpace will also stop showing advertisements for certain products - like online dating sites - to those under 18.

Older users sending a message asking to become friends with younger users will now 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. So all you have to do to subvert the system is to set your age to under 18 in one of your identities.

MySpace will also start to allow all members (instead of just minors) to designate their profiles as private and thus available only to their named list of friends.
Link

The bottomline is that none of these measures can be foolproof unless MySpace decides to verify age of registrants (using credit card?). It is however a step in the right direction without compromising much on the openness of the system.