It’s finally happened. A 14-year-old girl has filed a lawsuit against MySpace.

The lawsuit, filed last Monday in the District Court of Travis County, Texas, were aware that sexual predators troll MySpace looking for children. The suit seeks damages of no less than $30 million for fraud and negligence in misrepresenting their security measures to protect children and teens. The suit also charges 19-year-old Texas resident Pete Solis with sexual assault and emotional distress.

According to the lawsuit, on April 6, Solis contacted the girl via MySpace and reportedly lied about his background - that he was a high school senior. She provided her cell phone number and 6 days later, the two met and he allegedly sexually assaulted her.

MySpace has responded by restricting adult access to information teens provide about themselves. Starting next week, anyone over the age of 18 can’t request to be on a 14 or 15 year old’s friends’ list unless they already know the youth’s email address or full name.

Of course, it’s not that difficult to lie about your age on MySpace. What’s preventing adults from claiming to be teens? There’s no way MySpace can put any type of age verification into place without serious privacy concerns. I mean, it’s not like they’ll be able require social security numbers which are then checked against government data.

Personally, I don’t really see how MySpace is liable for this. It would be next to impossible for them to moderate every piece of information that people post to their site.

I also don’t see how legislation in the House of Reps right now - the Deleting Online Predators Act, which will supposedly block access to online social networks at schools - will help.

I think a better solution is for parents and schools to educate teens about what information is appropriate to divulge online. But even that requires parents to be aware of this relatively new social media phenomenon and take measures to interact and be a part of their children’s lives…