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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."

1 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. 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.