| January 24, 2006. MySpace.com,
the popular web-based community site, has been named
in a of recent lawsuits that contend the site failed
to provide adequate security to protect underage users
from alleged sex predators using the website to contact
underage people for sexual encounters.
The complaint began after the families of five underage
girls in Los Angeles brought separate suits against
MySpace after the teenage girls were reportedly sexually
assaulted by men they met on the site. These lawsuits
are premised on the notion that MySpace waited too long
to implement security software to protect younger users
that are inherently more vulnerable to internet predators.
MySpace is not alone in allegations that the Internet
allegedly facilitates the ease by which children can
be exploited sexually. Yahoo decided to remove a number
of user-created chatrooms in June 2005 because they
violated established Terms of Service regulations. Microsoft
faced a similar problem in 2003 when it shut down a
number of message boards across 28 countries, due to
the abuse of the services to proliferate pornographic
spam and use by online predators.
The laws that govern networking sites are not clear
cut. There are no laws that establish how the sites
should regulate their users or what protections they
must enact to ensure that no person or persons abuse
site features to create or maintain potentially criminal
relationships. There are a few legal precedents that
some legal scholars cite that illustrate it is not the
service provider's responsibility to police their users,
for it would be impossible and overly intrusive to "spy"
on each person's account.
A new way many prosecutors are attempting to take action
against services like MySpace is to use a new interpretation
of existing premises liability law and apply it to the
Internet. Under the law, owners of property have a duty
to provide reasonable protection to those that come
into their area; for example, if a person is murdered
in a parking lot because there was insufficient illumination,
and the judge determined that the crime would not have
occurred had there been lights, the property owner can
be held partly responsible for the crime.
It is difficult to say if this new interpretation will
apply to the vast expanses of Internet security, but
the recent cases against MySpace will certainly resound
long after the final gavel has slammed.
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