New York - A day after Attorneys General from seven states sent a letter to MySpace, demanding the names and locations of registered sex offenders using the site, and deletion of their profiles, the company said it has removed and blocked "a few thousand" such profiles, Reuters reported.

"We've made it clear we have a zero tolerance policy against convicted sex offenders," MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam told Reuters.

"We've said numerous times that the goal was to delete them."

The company responded to the letter from the Attorneys General by saying it is prohibited from divulging such information on its users without a court order, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.

MySpace, which teamed with Sentinel Tech Holdings to cross reference sex offender databases against its 175 million users, said it manually checked profiles of suspected offenders among its users before removing and blocking them from the service.

"We are doing everything short of breaking the law to ensure that the information about these predators gets to the proper authorities," Nigam told Reuters.

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