MySpace’s chief security officer

Last year we all experienced the perfect storm of parental fear development: Social networking coming out of nowhere (for parents) + MySpace’s exponential growth + a ton of negative media coverage (including “To Catch a Predator”) + a mid-term election in which politicians tried to respond to public fears with the effect of further fueling them. In the middle of that storm, a new position was created at a number of social sites: chief security officer. Fox Interactive, parent of MySpace, was, I’m almost certain, the first to hire one: former federal prosecutor and Microsoft consumer-safety director, Hemanshu Nigam (Hemu for short). CSO Magazine tells that story – from why Nigam took the challenge to what he has done to secure MySpace users’ experience. Parents may find it helpful to see a lot of these features and corporate practices in one place. As for what he and his staff are doing right now, here’s a snapshot: The social site’s “24/7 support operations team – currently about 40% of MySpace’s 300-person staff – manually reviews the 7 million images and videos that are posted every day. They also run searches to try to find underage users who post information, like the name of the elementary school they attend, that indicates they are not at least 14 years old. The company says it currently shuts down about 30,000 profiles of underage users each week.”