29,000 Sex Offenders Found on Myspace

MySpace has located and deleted a stunning 29,000 registered sex offenders from its site -- more than four times the number it initially reported, and 40 times what I found in doing the reporting that, for good or ill, started this whole thing. From the AP:

North Carolina's Roy Cooper is one of several attorneys general who recently demanded the News Corp.-owned Web site provide data on how many registered sex offenders were using the popular social networking site, along with information about where they live.

After initially withholding the information, citing federal privacy laws, MySpace began sharing the information in May after the states filed formal legal requests.

At the time, MySpace said it had already used a database it helped create to remove about 7,000 profiles of sex offenders, out of a total of about 180 million profiles on the site.

Cooper's office said Tuesday, however, that now the figure has risen past 29,000.

(...)

MySpace declined to comment on the figure, focusing instead on its efforts to clean up its profile rolls.