Keeping MySpace safe

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Roy Cooper, attorney general of North Carolina, calls them "the new mall." Adam Thierer of the Center for Digital Media Freedom calls them "digital town squares."

Social networking sites such as MySpace.com have sprouted up all over the Internet. MySpace alone has 85 million profiles, with 54 million unique users, making it the most trafficked of the social networks.

MySpace users can share personal information, interact with other users, keep an online public journal and listen to new music. A typical MySpace profile consists of at least one picture, the user's account name, information about the user's location, likes and dislikes, messages from other users and links to various other Web sites, including Web logs.

Members can join groups to raise awareness and money for government and political groups, nonprofit and philanthropic activities, and religious organizations.

But critics see danger in cases such as that of 16-year-old Katherine Lester. The Michigan teen was described by her father as "a good girl" with whom he "never had a problem."

That was before she met Abdullah Jimzawi, 20, on MySpace and tried to visit him in Israel. She was found in Jordan and sent back to the U.S.

At the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's (NCMEC) Dialogue on Social Networking Web Sites, Arnold E. Bell, the unit chief of the FBI's Innocent Images unit described the harm that teenagers can cause each other through MySpace.

Last week, a Texas woman and her 14-year-old daughter filed a lawsuit, Jane and Julie Doe v. MySpace and Pete Solis. Mr. Solis, 19, was charged with sexually assaulting the girl after meeting her on MySpace and arranging a meeting. The $30 million lawsuit says MySpace didn't do enough to verify its users' ages.

But Laura Gelman, associate director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University, says that although MySpace is liable for what occurs when users are on the site, the company cannot necessarily be blamed for what users do offline.

In response to complaints about the lack of security on MySpace, its parent company, Fox Interactive Media, has taken steps to increase safety. In May, the company hired Hemanshu Nigam, formerly an online security executive at Microsoft, as its chief security officer.