MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search 345
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."
Re:IANAL (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
recidivism. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:recidivism. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:recidivism. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:recidivism. (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 [ncfindoffender.com]). Now do a search of recidivist http://www.ncfindoffender.com/search.aspx [ncfindoffender.com] 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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Googling for that story I find:
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.
Re:recidivism. (Score:4, 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 [usdoj.gov].