Online savvy leads to online safety

Have you ever wondered how social-networking sites, such as Match.com and MySpace.com, filter out the “bad guys?” According to John Cardillo, founder and CEO of a company called Sentinel Tech Holding, they use his national database to identify those who have been convicted of violent and sexual offenses. Cardillo tells Consumers Digest that later this year consumers also will be able to tap into his database for about $10 per month to monitor whom they interact with online.

Cardillo, a former officer with the New York Police Department, says, “Having seen murdered and raped children … really seared it into my brain that there’s a particular level of bad guy.”

To use the forthcoming service, called Sentinel Cleared, users must go to the company’s Web site, create a profile and register the sites they regularly visit. Cardillo says the company runs a criminal background check on each user after he/she creates a profile. Consumers with criminal histories cannot create a profile with Sentinel Cleared and, therefore, cannot access the company’s Internet-security database. This database allows Sentinel Cleared members to search for other Internet users, even just by MySpace username, for example. It then verifies different characteristics of that person, such as age, the county in which he/she resides, other sites the user frequents and whether he/she has a criminal background.

Although the “bad guys” cannot access the Sentinel Cleared site, registered users of the site still can scope out criminals, because the database is a compilation of local, state and federal records. Sentinel Cleared is merely a gateway to reaching that information.

M. Noonan