I had (until today) a Myspace and Facebook page. I was cautious, never published my address, phone, or anything. I made sure that noone but my approved friends saw my profile by setting everything to private. I've yet to have a problem.
So...out of curiousity I took the advice of other posters and checkout out my own name and my DH's name on spock.com. In seconds for $2 someone could have all of my current info as well as every city I've ever lived in and even pictures of me. When I clicked to get more info it brought up some other "interesting sites"
Advertisement:
"with **spyer.com you can download software to uncover hidden private profiles, pictures, and private comments."
"with **keo.com you can find hidden friends private profiles across 40+ social networks"
I had always thought that private meant PRIVATE. Apparently not...but I am willing to admit when I am wrong. I deleted my myspace page (which I never used anyways) and gave my facebook page a trimming down to the bare minimum. I just thought I'd post these here as food for thought to add to what others have already said
MySpace kicks out 90,000 sex offenders, Connecticut AG says
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/03/myspace.sex.offenders/index.html
CNN) -- MySpace.com has identified and removed 90,000 convicted sex offenders from its popular social-networking site, according to one of the dozens of state attorneys general who pressured the site to beef up its safety standards.
i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/TECH/02/03/myspace.sex.offenders/art.myspace.safety.jpg MySpace.com's chief security officer said in 2007 that the site has "zero tolerance for sexual predators."
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who spearheaded the campaign to subpoena MySpace, told CNN Radio that he found the number "appalling."
"These convicted, registered sex offenders clearly create profiles seeking to prey on children," he said. "This revelation is totally appalling and unacceptable, and this shocking revelation, resulting from our subpoena, also provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain ripe with sexual predators."
MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, issued a statement: "As the first and only social networking site to use state of the art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections. As part of our longstanding partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations."
In May, MySpace announced that it would provide the coalition of state attorneys general with information on sex offenders who use the site.
"We have zero tolerance for sexual predators on MySpace," Nigam said at the time, as he introduced a tool known as Sentinel SAFE to track
Ok, so think the problem is solved? Think again!
Thousands of MySpace Sex Offender Refugees Found on Facebook
MySpace is in the spotlight today because it revealed that
90,000 registered sex offenders have been kicked off its site in the past two years. But where did all of those sex offenders go? Some evidence suggests that a portion of them are now on Facebook.
John Cardillo is a former New York City police officer and the CEO of Sentinel, a security technology firm based in Miami which helps MySpace, Bebo, MyYearbook, WePlay, and other social networks identify sex offenders. He goes so far as to call Facebook a “safe haven” for sex offenders. Needless to say, Facebook is not a client, and MySpace is his biggest one. But he shared some data with me that is hard to overlook.
Sentinel’s technology is the foundation for Sentinel SAFE, the software MySpace uses to identify sex offenders on its site. Sentinel SAFE is a database of more than 700,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S., complete with names, photos, dates of birth, email and IM addresses (when available), and more than a hundred other data points. Cardillo took the 90,000 sex offenders who were removed from MySpace and started looking for them on Facebook. He says:
We found over 8,000 offenders on their site without much effort. My professional opinion is that the real number is 15 to 20 times that.
The actual number of matches he found was 8,487. Rather than take his word for it, I have in my possession Cardillo’s spreadsheet with all the names. (
Update: Only 4,679 of them, however, are matched to a Facebook user ID). I also have about 100 mugshots of sex offenders along with their corresponding Facebook profile names and pictures. (I’ve reproduced four of the mugshots above). A spot check of the mugshots, which are publicly available, matched names and photos in the
National Sex Offender Registry. Once I had the names, it was pretty easy to find them on Facebook as well.
It is theoretically possible that people other than the sex offenders themselves created these Facebook accounts. Although they would have had to go to great lengths to do so (creating false profiles, culling all known information about these offenders, finding credible snapshots of the same people for their profile photos, setting up false e-mail accounts, and repeating the process thousands of times). And it is not clear why anyone would want to create a fake sex offender profile on Facebook. But even if this doesn’t prove that the actual sex offenders themselves created these profiles, it may not really matter.
In a
deal with 49 state attorneys general last May, Facebook agreed to identify and remove “profiles of all registered sex offenders.” Presumably this policy covers all profiles on Facebook, regardless of who created them.
How much would it cost Facebook to license the Sentinel screening technology? I asked Cardillo, and he said “fractions of a penny per user.” With 150 million users, he said that would come to under $1 million.
It could be even cheaper for Facebook to develop its own software to check official state sex offender registries, something it has proposed doing in the past. Maybe this home-grown system is already in place. But judging from the matches that Cardillo found, Facebook’s sex offender detection system needs some work. Several groups are already popping up on Facebook itself with names like
Get Child Molestors Off Facebook
for more check out the link
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/03/thousands-of-myspace-sex-offender-refugees-found-on-facebook/
However, even if they do (I have my doubts) it is alarming indeed. I believe that a general rule of thumb is not to put anything out there that you wouldn't want your grandma or boss to see.