Sexually Assaulted Teen Sues MySpace for 30 Million

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on MySpace.com sued the MySpace for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 “utterly ineffective.”

What do they expect MySpace to do? Ask every registrants to provide photocopy of age or driver’s license?
At the core I think the primary responsibility of managing their children is on the parents. And they have software like NetNanny. Why shift the blame on MySpace?

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace.com, said in a written statement: “We take aggressive measures to protect our members. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.” link

I agree with him. It is pretty much what an online company providing a free service can reasonably do without going bankrupt. The whole economy-of-scale model breaks if they have to recruit people to manually verify age of minors. MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the world’s third most-viewed Web site. Imagine the cost of manually verifying the age of 80 million people.

To create an account, a MySpace user must list a name, an e-mail address, sex, country and date of birth.
“None of this has to be true,” the lawsuit said.

This guy needs a wake-up call! No internet company can survive if it has to verify the age of each individual registering on its site.

Lauren Gelman, associate director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said she does not think MySpace is legally responsible for what happens away from its site.

“If you interact on MySpace, you are safe, but if a 13-year-old or 14-year-old goes out in person and meets someone she doesn’t know, that is always an unsafe endeavor,” Gelman said. “We need to teach our kids to be wary of strangers.”

That pretty much sums it. Didn’t her mother teach her not to go out with strangers?