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MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the not-if-but-when dept.

gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."

10 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IANAL by Nimey · · Score: 2, Informative

    Libel. Slander is spoken, libel is written.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  2. Re:It's a good thing, then... by Chr0me · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since the only mechanism via which MySpace can identify possible sex offenders registered on the site is comparison of items such as name, locale, DOB (for which many public lists, even of sex offenders, only use the month), etc., is this surprising? That someone with the same name, same birth month (which might have been all the matching information they had), and same location, which is pretty much all the information they have, could be seen as a match? Considering that there are probably a lot of people named "John Smith" born in June a name and month match would be highly likely. You glossed over the fact the the DOBs for these two women were two years apart. And a human decided that a 22 - 26 month difference was "close enough."

    You also ignore that the register sex offender was registered in Utah and that the woman whose page was taken down lived in Colorado and Florida previously, but not in Utah. so your same place argument falls too.

    Did you RTFA before spouting off? Oh wait /., I forgot where i was.
  3. Re:It's a good thing, then... by ptbarnett · · Score: 2, Informative
    I share the same name as a debtor, his calls come to my house. I have a 3" thick file on him. The government can do nothing to protect me, and there are no laws on the books to stop them from harassing me.

    Yes, there is. You just have to dig a little deeper.

    I had a similar problem: my name was the same as a guy that was married to a delinquent debtor, and I would get calls from collection agencies trying to find her. When I made the mistake of talking to one of them to try to correct their error, they copped an attitude and it went downhill from there.

    If you ask, they must identify themselves and provide a snail-mail address. I wrote a letter reiterating that I was not the person they wanted or related in any way to her. I cited the relevant penal code in my state and their state, and stated flatly that any further attempts to contact me would be considered harassment and I would file charges with the appropriate law enforcement agency.

    I sent the letter registered, return-receipt requested, and I sent copies to the Attorney General in both states.

    I never heard from them again.

  4. recidivism. by Rasputin · · Score: 1, Informative

    The registries exist because sex-offenders are much more likely to re-offend. While there are habitual murders, they're much more rare.

    --
    "I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
    1. Re:recidivism. by DragonWriter · · Score: 3, Informative

      The registries exist because sex-offenders are much more likely to re-offend.


      This is the premise, but the problem is it isn't really true. Pedophiles who target victims outside of their own family are much more likely to re-offend than most other criminals. Other sex offenders are not. Published sex offender registries are not restricted to the class of sex offenders that are much more likely to re-offend.

      Of course, there is also the problem that the registries, even where they list people who are more likely to reoffend, do little to actually protect anyone.
    2. Re:recidivism. by MedicinalMan · · Score: 4, Informative

      As other people have pointed out your are COMPLETELY wrong about your recividism statistics, which are meaningless themselves unless broken down by type of crime committed. "Sex offender" is a meaningless title because the crimes that fall within its umbrella are extremely varied. Peeing in an alley (indecent exposure) and rape (of any age) are both "sex offenses". So is "producing child pornography" by the child him/herself for his/her own use read this /. post And you altogether miss the point: Sex offender registries are made to make people feel safe. But how about the great majority of sex offenders who just have not been caught yet? The pool of potential offenders is large enough that rates of sexual crimes don't go down when you lock up the ones you catch. As a parent, I don't give a shit about the registries. I make sure my kids don't come into contact with any adults they don't know, expect of course in group situations like school or sports where they are not alone. When it comes to my wife, she takes general precautions to keep herself safe. What the hell am I supposed to do with a map showing all the sex offenders living around me? Knock on their doors and ask them to be nice? Tell the guy my daughter can't go to his house?

    3. Re:recidivism. by richarddshank · · Score: 3, Informative

      Its easy to say that sex offenders have a high recidivism rate, but what facts do you have to support it? There are a number of studies showing sex offenders as have the second lowest recidivism rate of all offenders (homicide being lowest).

      Want proof? There are 11884 registered sex offenders in the state of North Carolina (tally up the offenders from this page http://www.ncfindoffender.com/stats.aspx). Now do a search of recidivist http://www.ncfindoffender.com/search.aspx and there are only 71. Sorry, that is not a high recidivism rate.

      I also had my account deleted from MySpace. I am actually a registered sex offender. I also play music. I had a page for my music. I'm not going to cry about it because MySpace can allow and kick off who they want to. The thing that bothers me is the ignorance that is floated as fact about sex offenders. It ultimately does less to protect children. The truth is you have more concern about your child being a victim of a family member than someone on the registry re-offending.

      From the perspective of a past offender, I'm glad I was caught and convicted (I ended up being incarcerated for 15 months). It gave me the chance to get into therapy, deal with the screwed up things in my life. I now life a very happy, healthy and productive life.

    4. Re:recidivism. by SpecBear · · Score: 3, Informative

      I frequently see this claim as a justification for demonizing sex offenders, but I've never seen any hard data to back it up. And the U.S. Department of Justice seems to disagree.

  5. Re:It's a good thing, then... by daveschroeder · · Score: 2, Informative

    No. It is factually incorrect that she could be added to sex offender databases because of what MySpace is doing. You MUST have been convicted of a crime which classifies you as a sex offender to be, or be required to be, in a sex offender registry. That is a factual statement and is in no way "unverified"; that is how sex offender registries work and their very purpose. You cannot be added to a sex offender registry for any other reason or in any other way. You need to have been convicted of a crime by a court of law that classifies you as a sex offender.

    Further, the whole purpose of MySpace's matching is to take existing, legitimate sex offender databases, and match them against its own users, in what will always be in imperfect fashion. The very intent of this is to use an existing database for this, and I trust you see what's wrong with thinking that incorrect matching my MySpace somehow would contribute BACK to a sex offender database, when the only way a person can even BE in a sex offender database is via the mechanism I described above.

    I know you'll still want to believe that somehow what MySpace is doing is building sex offender databases somewhere, when it's doing essentially the exact opposite, which is using government-administered sex offender databases with known, convicted sex offenders in an attempt to match those persons with persons in MySpace, using an intentionally overly broad process. This is unrelated to whether or not what MySpace is doing is a good idea, which I don't believe it is.

  6. Re:It's a good thing, then... by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Informative

    Guess what? All media outlets can (and usually do) do it!

    Really? You have evidence of any major news outlet going to court and admitting they intentionally lied to viewers and that it was legal for them to do so? I'd like to see some citation of that.

    See CBS News, where Dan Rather insisted for several days after the documents were posted to LGF and other blogs that there was no evidence of forgery in the Killian memos.

    Googling for that story I find:

    Although CBS and Rather defended the authenticity and usage of the document for a two-week period, continued scrutiny from independent and rival news organizations and independent analysis of other copies of the documents obtained by USA Today raised questions about the documents' validity and led to a public repudiation on September 20, 2004. Rather stated, "if I knew then what I know now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question,"

    CBS did not defend their right to lie in court and neither did Dan Rather. They claimed that as soon as they found reliable evidence that the documents were faked they admitted to that and they claim that if they knew they were fake they would not have published the story. They did not say they knew they were fake but that it was okay for them to publish them anyway because they have no legal responsibility to not tell lies.

    Sorry, your comparison is way off. That is not the same issue at all. CBS at least publicly claims they will always print what they think is the truth. They have never openly defended intentionally lying to the audience.