(20 January 2007 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: The families of four under-aged girls have filed lawsuits against News Corp. and its MySpace.com social-networking site.

The families claim that their daughters were sexually assaulted by adults they first met on the site.

The suits, media reports state, have demanded unspecified millions of dollars in damages from MySpace and News Corp for "negligence, recklessness, fraud" and misrepresentation.

MySpace.com has also announced that it would start to offer free parental notification software in a bid to appease critics who worry that the site makes it easy for children to provide too much personal information, making them easy prey for sex offenders.

Parents will be able to use the software, named "Zephyr," to find out what name, age and location their children use to represent themselves on MySpace, but it won’t allow parents to read their children's e-mail or see their profile pages.

Each of the girls was allegedly lured into meetings with men who had chatted them up on MySpace then plied them with drugs or alcohol and sexually abused them, according to the suits.

Reports state that one of the men accused in the assaults was serving a 10-year prison sentence and the others were awaiting trials, according to lawyers for the girls.