HLS Professor To Lead Internet Committee

A Harvard Law School professor will lead a committee on Internet safety issues for the social networking Web site, MySpace.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, headed by John G. Palfrey, Jr. ’94 of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is the main product of an agreement last month between all fifty state Attorneys General and MySpace to take steps to better protect underage users. By the end of the year, the task force will publish recommendations for MySpace to improve its safety policies.

“The Berkman Center’s impressive research on the challenges and opportunities offered by the Internet makes them the ideal leader for the Task Force,” MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam wrote in a press release.

Because many MySpace users are teenagers, state governments have expressed concern over sexual predators prowling the site and victimizing minors, said Amie Breton, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, in an e-mailed statement.

As a result, the task force will be studying and recommending technological methods of community self-policing, identity authentification, and age verification to better MySpace’s practices.

With a membership list including organizations such as Microsoft, Facebook, and the Family Online Safety Institute, the group faces the challenge of incorporating varied perspectives into a coherent set of recommendations. But Palfrey said that all of the organizations in the task force share the common goal of protecting minors.

“It’s potentially the case where we won’t come to a consensus where everyone agrees,” Palfrey said. “But we will do our best to find common ground and to prescribe what we think are the best approaches to this.”

Despite the possible points of disagreement, such as the infringement of civil liberties, Palfrey said that he remains optimistic about the months of investigation to come.

“We go into this task force diagnostic as to the best approach very much with an open mind to learning what’s the best way to go about this,” he said.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.