As a federal prosecutor and father of four, Hemanshu Nigam has spent the last 16 years of his life stressing safety. Now, as the security czar for wildly popular and highly controversial social networking site MySpace, he will continue delivering the same message.
Named in April, 2006, as chief security officer at the Fox Interactive Media (FIM) unit of News Corp. (NWS), which owns MySpace.
He arrives none too soon. The Web site has come under harsh criticism in recent months, in part because youngsters on the site have been solicited by sexual predators and in some cases assaulted.
Nigam's approach to online security focuses mainly on what he calls the online "ecosystem." This consists of not only online companies and technology experts but also political figures, policy makers, law enforcement agencies, and the users themselves. Nigam had the chance to talk with many people from these groups on June 24, at a conference on Internet security organized by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Afterwards, he talked with BusinessWeek.com about the conference, MySpace, and the future of security online.
What came out of this conference? It was a great show of leadership by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children—calling this dialogue to have what was a very frank and open discussion. There was a tremendous exchange of ideas.
What resonated most in the room is that there is an essential need to collaborate. That's how we'll identify the true problems and challenges and identify the solutions we need to be focusing on. There were ideas raised that were strong steps in the right direction.
For example, we learned as we move forward that more teens are talking to teens about these safety issues and that it's, therefore, essential that we educate our teen population the same way we educate them about the offline world. It's critical that we translate those same life lessons to the online world.
How are you going to effectively police MySpace without enforcing an age limit? Can MySpace police the site without a truly effective age verification system? There's no technology or national system out there that allows us or any other Internet company to identify a human being online accurately. That doesn't mean we're going to stop looking for solutions. What it does mean is we're going to continue to offer services as we look for solutions that are technically challenging.
The data for folks under 18 that allow us to identify them is minimal. The challenge we're faced with is that if we institute some sort of age verification technology that exists today, because of the lack of data it's easy to get through the system another way. We might inspire a false sense of security, and the reality is these things are not 100%. And therefore we could end up creating a greater danger to people.
That's why we have to keep looking into this area. That's why it's great to sit in a room with attorneys general and the technical folks, because right now we don't really know what the solution is and we need to collaborate to find out.
Do you really think your proposed strategy is as effective as what the attorneys general have proposed? Why? The dialogue with attorneys general is essential. They play a critical role in this just as any other community expert does. We have the responsibility to engage in this dialogue and that's what we're doing. We focus on the technology safety features as well as education, working with the [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children] to highlight the importance of being safe online.
We have a 24/7 hotline for law enforcement, so if something goes wrong we can be there to respond. This needs to be a multi-pronged effort, so we're doing the best we can to make that happen.
Has the controversy over sexual predators had any effect on traffic growth? Ad rates or ad revenues? Our membership is growing, and the awareness of safety and security is growing. From a business perspective, there are two things: First, it's the right thing to do to provide safety and security for our members. Secondly, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 54 million unique visitors [according to the Mediametrix numbers from last month], and the desire to advertise to those members creates revenue.
If it makes advertisers uncomfortable at all, it's possible that there can be an effect on how many advertisers we have. So from a business perspective, too, it's important to provide safety and security.
Are the politicians who condemn child safety issues on MySpace only using the site as a convenient scapegoat, or are they right that children are somehow in more danger on MySpace than in the rest of their online life? This is an Internet issue. This is an issue that's affecting any company that's online, any company that has instant messenger or e-mail or photo sharing or blogging. These are all different ways people communicate online. And it's amazing! Around the world, people are engaging in the Internet world and they're doing it in the proper ways.
Unfortunately, there is a small component that is abusing that power. So the question becomes how do we overcome the challenges presented by this smaller population. This is what these policy makers are focused on, and politicians have a very important role in that. The ecosystem of safety and security requires every member of that ecosystem to be involved in its development. Only then can we take strides forward.
What restrictions are "bad," not just for MySpace but for its users? Any proposition that shuts down access to the Internet is not appropriate. This is part of the lives and part of the success of our future generation. This is how our world is operating, and part of the leadership of the world, and anything that shuts that down is not the right thing to do.
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