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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.
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.