Oopsies

My oh MySpace...

MySpace’s attempt to identify sex offenders and ban them from the site might please plenty of lawmakers and concerned parents. But it has left one student at the University of Colorado feeling awfully aggrieved, as Wired‘s Threat Level blog reports.

Jessica Davis, a 29-year-old senior at the university, was booted off MySpace earlier this month. Evidently the site had labeled Ms. Davis as “a registered sex offender in one or more jurisdictions,” a claim that left the student understandably horrified.

It appears that Ms. Davis was a victim of mistaken identity: She was mistaken for a sex offender with the same name and a birthday two years and two days apart from her own, according to the Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation, the company that designed MySpace’s database of sex offenders.

It’s hardly comforting that someone could so easily be dubbed a sex offender. But MySpace users may be even more troubled by how the company responded when Ms. Davis pleaded her innocence. In a message to Ms. Davis, the site said only that her profile was removed “because of a violation of our terms and conditions — which can include a number of things (underage, inappropriate images, cyber bullying, spam, etc).” As Threat Level notes: “Responding to Ms. Davis’ plea by sending her a form letter falsely accusing her of wrongdoing isn’t Solomonic jurisprudence.”