Patrolling MySpace

OK, so is MySpace a leader on Internet safety, as its chief security officer maintains, or is it guilty of negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation, as claimed in a lawsuit filed by four families after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site? The suit, which we reported on yesterday, puts Hemanshu Nigam in the line of fire. Who he? Nigam is the aforementioned CSO, but there's more to the story. A former prosecutor for both the L.A. County DA's Office and the Justice Department's criminal division (specializing in Internet child exploitation), he headed up the Motion Picture Association's enforcement arm before joining Microsoft, where he was in charge of criminal compliance, security, and law enforcement affairs. He joined Bev Hills-based News Corp.-owned MySpace last April. The site has been promoting its efforts at keeping things safe (special precautions for underage members, reviewing images hosted to the site, etc.), but patrolling all the crap that gets posted would seem pretty hopeless. The question is not so much whether nasty stuff will inevitably happen (it will), but whether MySpace did everything in its power to prevent it from happening. That's a judgment call and likely to be stuck in the courts for years.