Hemanshu Nigam: Mr. Safety for MySpace

Can CSO Hemanshu Nigam make MySpace a safe neighborhood, without also making it an empty one?

Other, quieter changes were made. For instance, MySpace employees noticed that some young members were listing their age as 69 (shorthand for a sexual position). Older members were then running searches for, say, 69-year-olds under four feet tall, in hopes of finding young members interested in sex. Now, members can no longer browse for people over the age of 68.

From his third-floor office at the studiously hip new digs in Beverly Hills that News Corp. built for Fox Interactive Media, Nigam takes a pragmatic approach to these types of changes. He works with his team to create what he calls an issue list. "We look at, what are hackers doing, what are predators doing?" he says. "Then we go to our engineers and say, suppose you have no worries about resources—what can we do to solve these issues? Is there a change we can make or feature we can add?" Once they have this list in hand, they try to figure out which five or 10 things they can do to hit 80 percent of the problem, and they build the priority list from there.

Perhaps the biggest change to grow from this issue list is an attempt to block known sex offenders from the site. A constant stream of news reports of children lured into meeting ill-intentioned adults they chatted with on MySpace have battered the site's reputation. One woman and her 14-year-old daughter sued MySpace for $30 million, after the girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old man she met on MySpace. (The case was dismissed in February.) An investigation published by Wired in October found hundreds of registered sex offenders who had created MySpace profiles using their real names, and some of them were busy collecting young "friends." So in December, MySpace announced that it was partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding, a background verification vendor, to build a central, national database of known sex offenders—information that previously had been scattered across numerous federal and state databases. The technology, known as Sentinel Safe, will allow MySpace to block those users from the site. (MySpace says its competitors can use the database as well.)

Critics were quick to point out that the move would simply force registered sex offenders to use aliases, but MySpace has been lobbying on that front too. On the heels of the Sentinel Safe announcement came a PR coup: Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced plans to introduce legislation that would force registered sex offenders to disclose their e-mail addresses to law enforcement. Using a nonregistered e-mail address would be a violation of probation or parole. The law, if passed, would provide MySpace with more information with which to make a match. In Virginia, the attorney general pushed for similar state legislation.