MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search

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."

Comments

Re:It's a good thing, then...

[Chr0me]

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.

Re:recidivism.

[MedicinalMan]

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?