New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has shared with the press that Facebook and Myspace are driving out the hoards of sex offenders that appear to

be frequenting the two social media outlets. The new program created by Cuomo is called eStop and it’s designed to prevent sexual offenders from potentially cause harm to others through manipulating the general ease of communication offered by Facebook and MySpace.

As things stand now, the NY State report indicates that both web services are working with the authorities to turn over any and all information on offenders to law enforcement. And considering the fact that the state of NY has over 8,000 sex offenders within its borders, it is going to take a lot of work from both social networking sites to make this a success. According to Cuomo, the eStop program will work to protect social networking users from potential harm.

What does this mean to you?

Even without the threat of sexual predictors, social networking sites are a haven for problems. And whether the user be an adult or a child, there is a need to make sure that all who participate in these social networking sites are free to do so without fear of being threatened, harassed or made to feel uncomfortable due to another person’s inappropriate behavior. While Facebook has done a reasonable job at protecting their users early on with private profiles, MySpace defaulted most people to public profiles. Only after significant law enforcement interaction, did the News Corp. company opt to step things up enough to actually provide any real level of protection for their users.

If successful, perhaps this action in NY State will signal other states to join in and help to keep their citizens safe. So long as they are indeed only targeting offenders and not censoring people who have done nothing wrong, I do not believe we will be seeing any significant issues in keeping individual rights intact as the world moves into the social networking space.