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.

Comments

People lie all the time.

[still_sick]

Especially about themselves.

No reasonably sensible person "needs" a warning to remind them of this fact.

Re:People lie all the time.

[Have Blue]

The best part of that warning is how it raises the possibility that the bag of peanuts does not contain peanuts.

Total Upfront Disclosure of All Your Past Mistakes

[srobert]

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.

Re:I'm way ahead of them.

[Ayaress]

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.

I'm not surprised..

[Anonymous Cumshot]

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.

20% of Internet users...

[Steffan]

"We found that 20 percent of Internet users believe that some of the larger dating services do background checks when in fact they do not. We believe there's a false sense of security out there that needs to be corrected through disclosure."

In other news, 20% of internet users believe that clicking on Bonzi Buddy could win them a prize.

Re:I'm way ahead of them.

[shawb]

Oddly enough, if True.com is put out of business by a lawsuit stemming from this, that wouldn't change the fact that companies would still have to follow the law. Then all matchmaking sites would be forced to decide between three choices:

Risk getting suid by customers.
Risk getting fined by states.
Just not offering the service from people from those states.

I wonder if this would get customers to start writing to their representatives if match.com would simply deny anybody from CA. the right to create an account and suspend any accounts from that state with just a message of

• "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.