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True.com Wants Warnings On Personal Ads
An anonymous reader submits "News.com.com is reporting that personals company True.com is behind a push in several state legislatures to require everyone but them to include scary looking warnings above personals ads. I'm sure they're not the first, but this looks like a particularly slimy way to corner a market. And the unintended consequences look big, too: by my read of the proposed law, even Slashdot would need to include the warnings above user profile pages." In just a few weeks, this would sound like an April Fool's joke. I hope every legislator to whom this is being shopped is sent a copy of Declan's counter-example.
We haven't proven for certain that this person isn't a psychopath!
Good. Maybe this will make people more aware that these things aren't the greatest idea. A relative of someone my dad works with disappeared for months after meeting someone she met on the net, and worried everyone in her family sick.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
Especially about themselves.
No reasonably sensible person "needs" a warning to remind them of this fact.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
How could this kind of law possibly stand up to even the most cursory first amendment test?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
WARNING: This guy whose personal ad you're reading is the kind of paranoid weirdo who does FBI criminal background checks on women he's thinking of dating.
or
WARNING: This guy whose personal ad you're reading is the kind of person who thinks government regulation is a good replacement for common sense.
But seriously, it seems like people have an insatiable appetite for security measures that won't help them, and an intense distaste for security measures that actually might help them.My favorite was the little warning on the side of the box of Shredded Wheat that said it contained wheat products.
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How many of you are in a successful relationship that would have never gotten off the ground if you had been required to reveal all of your past upon meeting your mate? When we first meet someone, most of us would like to keep some of our skeletons in the closet, at least until the other has grown to know us as we are now. It would be unfair if a potential new mate's opinion of me were based upon horrible mistakes that I made early in my life.
Is that sig 12-point, though?
Anyway, the law strikes me as kind of stupid. Something I found noteworthy from the article is that True.com's searches apparantly don't catch criminals who are using fake names. This makes me wonder what data they search by.
Background searches just by name are possible, but they aren't reliable. For a simmilar slashdot thread, I decided to start putting my name into various sites, and now I know there's a sex offender in my state (Disclaimer: it's not me, so stfu) who happens to have my last name, a slightly different spelling of my first name, and my middle initial. If they're just doing this by name, am I going to get labled as a rapist? There are a lot of people with the same name (There's litterally a half a page in the Saginaw County phone book just for John, Jack, and J. Smiths), so there's the possibility of very humiliating false positives.
The solution of course would be for them to ask for social security numbers, and we know where that discussion usually leads.
Yes, that's just like warning signs on everyday products. I mean most of us still drink coffee even if the cup cover says "Might be hot".
True.com might have intentions to disadvantage competitors, but it will just result in another silly warning which will be ignored by the broad public.
Which leads to another point: Is it really necessary to conduct such searches if the legal system and the police are doing their job properly? Might sound naive, but isn't it just as naive to not assume as an individual that you might meet a married person on probation online?
I don't read replies by ACs.
Now people will have yet another reason to sue someone for not informing them of what they should figure out by themselves.
Soon everything will come with a warning label, making warning labels as such obsolete and personal responsibility a thing of the past.
This is just another instance of "hot coffee; do not spill!" and it truly saddens me to know that some people actually have to be told these things.
Best regards, A.C.
Does it occur to anyone that the nanny state may be going just a little far.
The day will come that I drive around drunk in a '95 F-150 with a oil leak pre-installed, smoking unfiltered Camels, eating only at Waffle House, etc., etc., simply to protest this idiocy.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Why is GP modded troll and offtopic btw? He has a point, because there must be a line drawn between warnings which have the purpose of informing an individual of dangers which can't be guessed and silly things which you knew before anyways. He might approach this issue in a funny way (because there isn't really a way to take this in a serious manner), but the point is still valid and quite ontopic.
I don't read replies by ACs.
The thing I find interesting is that by doing these background checks True.com is really setting itself up for some really nasty lawsuit at some point. They will screw up a check or something like that and something will happen and they will get sued for millions - as they should frankly. I just don't see this marketing ploy (which is all it really is anyway) as paying off in the long run. The other more well known dating services aren't going to lose market share based on this.
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Like every other case where someone has attempted to control the Internet, this would simply have the effect of causing servers to move out of the state (or out of the country) to avoid the law.
The only other possibility is to try the China approach: Make sure that every ISP operating within the state blocks illegal sites, setting up a vigorous game of whack-a-mole against the proxies.
It's somewhat comforting to know that no matter what any bonehead legislature does, it really won't make any difference. The legislature doesn't stand a chance against the force of the culture. And our culture simply doesn't tolerate attempts to control content on the Internet.
Here is more than you want to know about Herb Vest except it doesn't say if he has a criminal record or if Eliyon did a criminal background check on him.
:)
Some highlights:
Herb Vest, owner of True, is quoted as saying, "We went into this business to help reduce the national divorce rate."
He has a masters in Taxation, one of 7 degrees. He does seem to have an amazing educational background, almost to amazing, Princeton, Harvard Law and Wharton, though maybe Eliyon didn't verify his background
@de_machina
- "Due to article H2732b, Match.com is unable to offer services to your state. Please contact your local representatives by clicking HERE."
(where here is a link to an automagic form where you just put your name and other info in, and off it goes.)Then I guess a better question to ask would be whether or not the representatives actually care about what people write to them, especially in e-mail form.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
The Surgeon General's Warning is a limitation on commercial speech (i.e. advertising something for sale). Commercial speech, while protected under the First Amendment, does not get as much protection as other types of speech. See Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council.
Not to mention that the tobacco warnings are for a very serious and real threat. Tobacco is proven to cause death in a high percentage of the people who use it. No such statistical link is known to exist between online dating and death... nor is there any reason to believe there would be such a link.
This isn't commercial speech, because it's a limitation on communication between individuals who are communicating for a romantic purpose... not a commercial purpose.
I don't think these statutes would last more than five minutes in a Federal District Court.
Clearly this isn't really going to pass. It is a PR ploy plain and simple. He probably made some campaign contributions to state legislators and they are paying him back by introducing a bill they will then let die in committee. In the meantime he gets all this free ad space.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Interesting. Look what I found on the Rapsheets.com web site (btw, am I the only one who sees "rapsheets" and thinks "rapesheep"?):
Good News from Rapsheets!
Rapsheets has been acquired by ChoicePoint. Due to this recent acquisition, Rapsheets is now able to offer its consumer users access to ChoiceTrust.com, a comprehensive site offering background check products for family security and more.
I suppose that's all in how you define "good news," considering what ChoicePoint has been through in the past week.
I've used match.com on a few occasions. The most recent time, my income had gone north of $150K, so that's what I chose. I noticed a significant increase in women who wrote to me. This was not a good thing.
"I never actually met anyone from match.com in real life. I even subscribed for 3 months and emailed probably 20 different girls. Most didn't reply, and the closest I got to a date was a phone call with a girl who thought the world revolved around her. So if you're thinking about subscribing... don't expect miracles! I think only tall, dark and handsome guys do well online, but they don't really need dating sites anyway!"
I'd classify myself as "average" and I've done quite well on the matchmaking sites -- haven't yet found the right one, but I've met and dated at least ten very attractive women this way. It's all in your schtick. Being a good writer helps. Try experimenting with your approach and your tone, and don't send copy-and-paste generic notes -- people can easily tell when you do this. Meeting people online isn't easy, but like golf or skiing, working on your form helps quite a bit.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"20% of Americans are in the bottom quintile of the bell shaped curve."
If this is true, then is it a normal distribution, e.g., is the curve even bell shaped?
"In Europe such a background check would breach most laws about privacy."
Do you mean the person is not allowed to give permission for the service to do a background check? That's what's happening here. The user is giving the site explicit permission to do a certain type of background check, and even paying a fee to have it done.
It's not like the site is clandestinely investigating the applicants. That would be illegal, expensive, and difficult in the US also.
If this is true, then explain why McDonald's can be found liable for burns suffered by certain customers from coffee spills? And how True.com will avoid the same problems?