Hemanshu Nigam: Mr. Safety for MySpace

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

"Anytime you have users interacting in one location, eventually you're going to have bad people show up," acknowledges Nigam, who has a disarmingly straightforward manner when questioned about problems on the site. During an interview that lasts the better part of a workday, he manages to come across as polished without being slick, with short black hair that's spiked up on top to minimize the thinning—the former fed trying to fit in at a company where he is at least a decade older than most of his coworkers. For him, he explains, the fact that his security initiatives are not 100 percent effective is beside the point.

"There are lots of things a bad guy could do to get around systems that are in place," says Nigam simply, his navy blazer draped over an empty chair next to him. "But from our perspective, that doesn't mean you don't put the systems in place. You do everything you can. You predict and you attack, you fix, you change, you make it difficult. And while you're making it difficult, you constantly raise awareness around what's going on."

The Business Balance

None of what Nigam has done, of course, is enough to appease MySpace's critics. The copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by Universal Music, which is owned by Vivendi—another international media juggernaut—is unlikely to go away easily. In January, four more families sued MySpace for millions of dollars, claiming their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed, and the Senate is considering, legislation that would require public schools and libraries to restrict the use of social networking websites by minors. And the group of state attorneys general, threatening legal action, is not budging on what they see as the need for MySpace to institute age verification.

"All the changes they've made have certainly been positive, but as we've expressed to them, they're not the most effective means of protecting children online," says Chaudhuri of the North Carolina attorney general's office. "They're all changes on the margin and don't focus on the critical issue of trying to distinguish the child from the adult or the adult from the child."

Nigam hints that he would like to figure out how to solve this problem. In fact, MySpace's partner on the sexual predators database, Sentinel Tech, says it does provide age verification. "It should be telling that we're partnering with a company that offers that, and we're not using that part of it," Nigam says when quizzed. "It is extremely difficult to verify the age of people who are under the age of 18. Publicly available data does not exist. We do think parents can have a role in it, and we're examining what can be done with parental involvement." Soon after, MySpace announced that it was developing free software that parents could install on their home computers to monitor what name, age and location their children are using at the site.