Don't be alarmed: 29,000 sex offenders on MySpace

There are about 600,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States. As of this month, 29,000 of them had profiles on MySpace.

The number comes from a group of state attorneys general who threatened MySpace with legal action if it didn't scrub its social network of registered sex offenders. In May, the company estimated that only 7,000 sex offenders had profiles on the site; the actual number, it found after deeper research, was four times as many.

MySpace has deleted the 29,000 profiles. But as Roy Cooper, North Carolina's attorney general, noted in a statement, MySpace can only associate sex offenders with profiles when the offenders use real names to set up their sites; there could be many other sex offender profiles the site doesn't know about.