New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that more than 3,500 sex offenders from his state have been purged from Facebook and MySpace.
Both companies have long had policies against registered sex offenders using their services, but the implementation of New York's new Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act ("E-Stop") has made it easier for the sites to identify perpetrators from the Empire State.
Facebook, according to Cuomo, was able to identify and disable the accounts of 2,782 registered sex offenders. MySpace deleted 1,796 accounts.
Cuomo has long been concerned about predators on social-networking sites. In January 2008, New York was one of 49 states that entered into an agreement with MySpace that resulted in a set of principles to combat harmful material on MySpace and other sites. In October 2007, Cuomo's office said Facebook could face a consumer fraud charge for misrepresenting the site's safety for minors, but two weeks later Cuomo and Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly held a joint press conference to announce a "cooperative effort."
The E-Stop law bans many registered offenders from using social-networking sites while on parole or probation and requires all registered offenders to disclose their e-mail addresses, screen names, and "other Internet identifiers." That data is provided to social-networking sites to run against their roles.
The state of New York, according to Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, "built its database with the idea of social-networking companies running it against their user base." He said the way it was coded, made it a lot easier to find matches. Other states, said Schnitt, "sometimes just fax over a list. Their databases are designed to help people find out if there is a sex offender living on their street. This is a very different use case."
Sex offender data is collected by states and there is no currently official federal database. The federal Adam Walsh act calls for such a database but it hasn't been funded. In 2006, MySpace contracted with Sentinel Safe to build a national and searchable registered sex offender database.
While praising Facebook and MySpace's cooperation, Cuomo said that "many other social-networking sites remain slow at adopting available new protections against sexual predators online." He said his office "sent letters urging them to take action now to similarly purge sex offenders from their sites."
As always, it's important to put this news into perspective. It only involves registered sex offenders, which, of course, is a good start, but it only includes people who have been caught and convicted. And, while the companies do their best to ferret out registered offenders who try to hide their identity, there is no way to know how many people succeed in eluding them.
Also, we know of very few children who have been sexually molested by someone they met on social-networking sites or any Internet sites. The vast majority of child sex abuse victims know the offender from the real world. I'm not aware of any cases of a pre-pubescent child being harmed by someone he or she met online and it's even rare among teens.
And, based on conversations with security officials at social-networking companies, I am not aware of any cases where a registered sex offender has been convicted of using the site to aid in harming a child he or she met on that site.
"There are still zero cases reported of any registered sex offender who was booted off MySpace being prosecuted for illegal contact occurring on MySpace," said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace parent company News Corp.
In January, the Harvard Law Berkman Center's Internet Safety Technical Task Force issued a report that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predators than many had feared, though that report was initially met with some skepticism from some attorneys general.
Correction: This posting originally misstated the Internet youth growth rate and population. Internet usage among youth grew from 73 percent in 2000 to 93 percent in 2006.
The news from a new online predator study is mostly good. Researchers from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CCRC) found only a modest increase in the number of adults arrested for solicitation of actual minors, which could be accounted for by the growth in the number of youth Internet users.
In 2006 there were 615 arrests for soliciting a real child, compared with 508 in 2000 and during that interval the percentage of young people using the Internet grew from 73 percent to 93 percent. The study defined young people as ages 17 and below. (To put that into some kind of perspective, there were more than 25 million 12- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. in 2006 based on U.S. Census Bureau data as reported on ChildStats.gov.)
The time span covered by this new study coincides with the advent of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, which weren't around in 2000. And considering the numbers, it should help dispel the hysteria about the so-called predator dangers on social-networking sites.
The study did reveal a very significant number of sting operation arrests in which the offender approached an undercover police officer posing as a minor. That's a crime and, says CCRC Director David Finkelhor, these sting operations may have played a major role in helping to reduce the number of actual victims by taking predators off the street and deterring others from even trying.
The study found that during 2006, 87 percent of the arrests involved solicitation of undercover cops, and 13 percent of the cases involved actual minors. To put this into perspective, online predator arrests that year accounted for only 1 percent of all arrests for sex crimes against children.
Most victims were adolescents (not young children) and only 5 percent of the crimes involved violence. "They don't involve offenders who troll the net and harvest children's information from blogs or social networking sites and then lure them into meetings where they abduct them," Finkelhor said in a podcast interview. "These are offenders who start up conversations, often times acknowledge being an adult and often times acknowledge that they're interested in sex and looking for sexual partners."
These predators, said Finkelhor, "prey on kids who are vulnerable to the flattery and the excitement they offer and these kids go to meet these adults knowing they are interested in sex. More often than not they meet them on more than one occasion."
What this and previous studies suggest is that there are some kids who take extraordinary risk but that most kids are savvy enough to avoid getting into conversations with adult predators.
Policy Implications
This study should have broad implications for policy makers and Internet safety educators. For example, some state attorneys general have called for age verification to control teenage access to social-networking sites, yet the data suggest that social networking has not put kids at any increased risk.
And Internet educators, said Finkelhor, need to warn young people about "very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivety and interest in exploring the world" such as "talking to people online about sexual matters, going to sexually oriented kinds of sites, going to meet someone who is much older for an encounter that they know involves sex." You'll find more tips at ConnectSafely.org.
Disclosure: I am co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several Internet and social networking companies including MySpace and Facebook. I also served as a member of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force and am the founder of SafeKids.com.
Listen to Larry's interview with CRCC director David Finkelhor
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There has been a dramatic growth in arrests of online predators who solicit undercover police officers, but--on a percentage basis--a significant decrease in arrests for soliciting actual kids, according to a study released Tuesday by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
During a period where Internet use among youth increased from 73 percent to 93 percent, there was only a modest (21 percent) nationwide increase in the number of individuals arrested for soliciting real children from 508 arrests in 2000 to 615 in 2006.
To put this study into perspective and to help parents and policymakers better protect kids, I spoke with the center's director, David Finkelhor.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
WASHINGTON -- A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared. The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.
The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general.
Over the past couple of years, several state AGs have been looking into potential dangers to youth, and some have called for social-network sites to use age verification technology to confirm the ages of users in an attempt to prevent adults from or interacting online with minors. The task force includes representatives of Internet and social-networking companies, security and identity authentication vendors, and nonprofit advocacy organizations. It's chaired by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Disclosure: I served as a member of the task force, representing ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit internet safety organization I co-founded along with Anne Collier. ConnectSafely receives financial support from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet and social-networking companies. I am also founder of SafeKids.com and am on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is represented on the task force.
Based on data analyzed by its Research Advisory Board, the task force concluded that "actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine" and that "the image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated offline encounters."
While the task force found that youth risk from predators is a concern, the overwhelming majority of youth are not in danger of being harmed by an adult predator they meet online. To the extent that young people have received an unwanted online sexual solicitation, data from a 2000 study and a 2006 follow-up from the Crimes Against Children Research Center concludes that "youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48 percent in 2000; 43 percent in 2006) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20 percent; 30 percent), with few (4 percent; 9 percent) coming from older adults, and the remaining being of unknown age."
What the task force did find is that "bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most salient threats that minors face, both online and offline." Partially because researchers can't agree on a definition of bullying and harassment, the actual risk is hard to quantify, but it is clearly much higher than the risk of being harmed by a predator. Some studies suggest that as many as 49 percent of youth have experienced some type of bullying or harassment. In many cases no serious emotional or physical harm occurred. However, a study by Michelle Ybarra and Janice Wolak found that "39 percent of victims reported emotional distress over being harassed online."
There is also a widespread belief that deception is often involved where adults pose as teens to engage with young people, but research shows that that's rarely the case. The report found that "although identity deception may occur online, it does not appear to play a large role in criminal cases in which adult sex offenders have been arrested for sex crimes in which they met victims online." Interviews with police show that "most victims are underage adolescents who know they are going to meet adults for sexual encounters." This does not imply that such relationships are healthy or safe, nor that we should blame the victims or tolerate the actions of adults who engage in sex with minors. But it does suggest that child safety advocates need to take a more proactive role in helping teens understand the risk of engaging in relationships with adults.
Importantly, the task force found that online risks "are not radically different in nature or scope than the risks minors have long faced offline, and minors who are most at risk in the offline world continue to be most at risk online." For example, "a poor home environment full of conflict and poor parent-child relationships is correlated with a host of online risks."
The attorneys general who called for the task force were anxious for us to study the efficacy of using age verification to help limit inappropriate contact between adults and children online. To help in that job, the task force formed a technical advisory board (TAB) composed of technology experts from Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts, University of Utah, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Bank of America. This board looked at a wide range of technologies including age verification and identity authentication, filtering and auditing, text analysis, and biometrics.
What the TAB found was that age verification technology can be used to identify adults and therefore help prevent minors from engaging in adult-only activities such as accessing adult content or purchasing alcohol or tobacco. There were several technologies submitted by companies that could identify adults based on accessible records such as credit reports, criminal history, and real estate transactions, but these relatively automated systems cannot reliably identify or verify the age of minors because, as the TAB concluded, "public records of minors range from quite limited to nonexistent." Documentation about young people such as birth certificates, passports, and school records are restricted by federal law for some very good privacy and security reasons.
Age verification options presented by some companies would allow parents to request that their child's school verify his or her identity and age, but these proposals have their own critics including those who worry about the cost, the possibility of privacy or security leaks, and the financial model presented in some cases that includes providing marketers with information about kids.
The TAB also looked at "peer-based" verification schemes that "allow peers in a community to vote, recommend, or rate whether a person is in an appropriate age group based on relationships and personal knowledge established offline" but worried that with these methods "users can vote as many times as they wish to artificially raise or lower a peer rating." There were concerns that "minors might organize against another minor in their ratings or recommendations in an online form of bullying."
At one task force meeting, a company presented technology that tries to distinguish between an adult and a child by analyzing the bone density of the person's hand. Another tool attempts to identify an individual through facial recognition to match that person against a database of registered sex offenders.
Although the TAB expressed "cautious optimism" about the possibility of using technology to protect kids, it concluded that "every technology has its problems" and that "no single technology reviewed could solve every aspect of online safety for minors, or even one aspect of it one hundred percent of the time." The bottom line was that "technology can play a role but cannot be the sole input to improved safety for minors online" and that "the most effective technology solution is likely to be a combination of technologies."
But even if these technologies can be employed effectively, there remains the question of whether they are necessary or helpful. Using technology to separate kids from grown-ups doesn't address the fact that kids are far more at risk from other kids than from adult predators.
Another danger is that age verification or new rules could be used to keep kids off of social networks or require parental consent. But before issuing rules about this, authorities should explore possible unintended consequences such as isolating kids, causing them to go underground, failing to serve kids from dysfunctional families, and preventing kids from accessing vital services such as the Suicide Prevention Hotline or one of the many online self-help groups.
The task force report will have its critics, including possibly some attorneys general and others who feel that it underestimates the risk of online predators. Indeed, sting operations from law enforcement (as well as the TV show To Catch a Predator) demonstrate that there are plenty of adults who, if given the chance, would engage in sex with youth they meet online. But, based on the research presented to the task force, it appears that the vast majority of young people are savvy enough to avoid such encounters.
Still, there remains a minority of youth who--for a variety of psychological and social reasons--are vulnerable both online and offline. More research needs to be done to identify these young people and provide them with resources and protective services. The fact that most kids are safe is reassuring but it's not sufficient. If even one child is in danger, then there is work to be done, and that is one thing everyone who cares about this issue can agree on.
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