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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."
...that MySpace isn't the government, and this woman is still "innocent", and is, in fact, not a sex offender, regardless of whether MySpace's own internal processes "identified" her as one.
It's amusing to me that the summary tosses around words like "wrongly brand", when MySpace hasn't "branded" - which implies a public, overt identification - anyone as anything. And even if the woman's friends ask why her profile is gone, it's not as if they're going to accidentally and arbitrarily believe she really is a sex offender.
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?
Is it further surprising that MySpace doesn't yet have a reasonable mechanism to deal with improper identifications as yet? Sure, maybe they should, but from their perspective, it's more important for them to respond to the requests to get people who are obviously sex offenders registered with their real information off the site. Since MySpace isn't a court or the government, the whole "better to let a hundred guilty men free than jail one innocent man" doesn't apply in the least. (Unless, of course, you think having MySpace removed from your life is a significant "punishment".)
No one has a right to a MySpace profile, MySpace isn't the government, and hasn't identified, much less "branded", the woman in any public fashion as a sex offender.
This of course ignores that sex offenders/pedophiles/etc. can clearly register under bogus names, addresses, and so on. On the other hand, is it a good idea to let registered sex offenders (arguments about an 18 year old with his 16 year old high school sweetheart getting tagged as a "registered sex offender" aside) who are registered with their real information remain on a site like MySpace? And just because "they can come back and register with false information," is that any reason to let persons who have registered with their real information stay? Sure, the mechanism for identifying such people may be imperfect, but again, repeat after me: MySpace is NOT the government, even if it was acting under pressure from various states/municipalities/etc.
But people do need to recognize that all a sex offender has to do is register with a false name and nothing more, and MySpace will not be able to identify them at all. However, MySpace can still say it has still done all it can reasonably do in response to the various demands to "remove" sex offenders from the site. MySpace's own business interests in this arena trump an exceedingly small number of individuals from possibly getting improperly flagged.
Are you surprised? I for one can say that I'm not at all surprised. Stuff like this is bound to happen. It's the reason why MySpace should take a stance that their site is an open forum, and they do not control what goes on there. Otherwise, if Myspace starts saying they are sex-offender-free, and then some still slip by, they are in for a huge lawsuit.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, the only reason MySpace finally did this was because of pressure from various states' attorneys general, etc., making such demands:
r s
http://news.google.com/news?q=myspace+sex+offende
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace#Child_safety
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?"
This needs to be expanded to include domestic violence offenders. That would be really valuable for dating sites.
In the, "old days," back when I grew up, parents actually talked to their kids and educated them not to talk to strangers. Today, parents don't seem to be capable of this, and instead want the government, schools, and internet service & content providers to make sure their precious little f**ktards don't get into trouble.
Sooner or later you'll have to prove your innocence after some social networking site identified you as sex offender or terrorist. After all, they have all the social networking data, so they should know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Imagine they would have identified a man. Aside of sexism, imagine would would go down if that was a guy. Imagine a guy who created a profile and, to make matters worse, imagine he had an interest in computer games, "modern" music or other activities usually associated with teenagers, and if he even had a few teenagers in his friends group (or whatever it's called in MySpace).
Think he could've escaped the witchhunt?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know this may not be a popular stance, but once a sex offender has served their time (probation and all) can we dispense with the whole sex offender registration bullshit? If we can't live with the fact that these people are released from prison, then the whole system is flawed.
And can we please get our sex offender laws in a state in which we can not prosecute kids who sleep with other kids (i.e. 18 year olds and 16 year olds having sex). Personally, I'm tired of the whole sex offender "bogieman". It has gotten to the point where the term gets associated with the worst kinda behavior. Maybe I'm just biased because I've never been "sex offended" but I can't help but think that their are degrees of sex offense, and our system just seems to lump them all together, to the point of hyperbole. As a result, I believe that the whole term "sex offender" is becoming watered down to the point of it being worthless as a metric to judge whether a person is a real threat.
Why stop there? Lets make drug offenders register as well.
Let us think of some possible scenarios: random rape, date rate, child rape, child molestation, groping, lewd conduct, public nudity. Of these, which ones do you consider serious? Do you believe they should all be grouped as sex offenses? I don't even know if they are all considered sex offenses, I tried to look it up to determine if my list was valid, but in the short time I looked on google for sex offenses, all I got were sex offender registry links, so I can't even look up to determine what constitutes a sex offense.
The other problem is when people get falsely accused of a sex offense. When you have 2 people, one says they did something, and the other denies it, how do you determine who is correct, provided there is a lack of specific evidence? Kids have been known to falsely accuse. Adults have been known to falsely accuse. The whole matter has gotten out of hand.
All those jews should be listed where we know who they are.
All those communists should be listed where we know who they are.
All those terrorists should be listed where we know who they are.
All those sex offenders should be listed where we know who they are.
Each step, is one step closer to fascism.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
What baffles me is that it seems sensible to everyone to register them in a database, but no one seems to be suggesting mandatory extensive psychological treatment. If they have an uncontrollable and dangerous compulsion, then they are psychologically ill. We have institutions for treating that sort of thing, but everyone is so busy being disgusted by child predators that no one is willing to consider that some of them might be sick, and that it might be better for society as a whole to try to treat them.
Yet, inconveniently, they apparently need to live somewhere. And everywhere is next door to someone.
Try explaining to your boss how you're not really a sex offender even though "The computer says you are one." Sometimes I think your perfect Libertarian paradise here sounds a little bit like a scene from Hell in the Twilight Zone.
Human rights transcend contract law. You can't sign away the right not to be falsely accused of pedophilia. Corporate person or real person, contract law has limits.
Somewhere in the vast wasteland of your software licenses, some joker may have inserted the right of his company to adopt your children against your will. Ha ha, you clicked through.
No, you are getting this all wrong.
We need more scare, more laws, more punishment, life-time registration and all that.
Because, you see, the really, really evil thing is that these people are sex offenders. Got it? It's sex for christ's sake, or better not for his sake because we need to think of the chiiildren. And we have to make sex illegal. Since we can't do that (hey, we've tried for 2000 years, for some reason it just doesn't stick) at least let us turn as much of it into a taboo as possible. The term is great. "sex offender". It doesn't say a thing about what they actually did, but it says it's about sex and they offended us, and that's as close as we'll get to the "sex offends us" as we can get right now. Of course, sex scares us as well, but that's just because we don't have much of it, except with the choir boys and that doesn't really count, does it?
Thanks for listening,
Your friendly neighbourhood christian fundamentalist club
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Excuse me ... that is not functioning properly at all. That is a major malfunction, caused either by a bad design or an error in programming. Merely having the same name absolutely cannot be used for this kind of matching, even if the birthdates matched exactly (which they did not).
That is on top of MySpace's utter failure to actually do any real investigation when they were informed that an error had taken place. So they compounded the error with a lie, and can no longer just blame it all on Sentinel.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars