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."
It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am unsurprised (Score:5, Insightful)
http://news.google.com/news?q=myspace+sex+offende
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace#Child_safety [wikipedia.org]
Same name ... and kinda the same birthday ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Standard response to concern about privacy issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I can't read the article, there should be a mechanism for her account to be re-instated- a 'white listing' that proves she has been validated. As was said, no one has a 'right' to a myspace profile. Those that say "Free Speech" mis understand the intended purpose- the Government can not Censor a Newspaper... not whether or not a company can let you post (baring discrimination based upon gender, race, orientation, ability, or intelligence).
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. Today's a good day- I can make light of it. Catch me on a bad day and I'll be in a foul mood for a week after one of their harassing phone calls.
In the end she'll work it out, I'm sure- if all else the press generated will pressure the company to reinstate the profile. Which is as the system should be.
Domestic Violence Offenders should be banned, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
This needs to be expanded to include domestic violence offenders. That would be really valuable for dating sites.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, this is not quite as innocuous as you seem to imply. If a myspace profile is suddenly gone and people know MySpace is removing known sex offenders, it is entirely possible they will assume she is a sex offender, especially if they search for her name and find info that seems to imply that. Worse, they may well make comments to that affect on their own pages, seeding Google with further slander. People tend to believe authorities and in this case, they may well assume MySpace has better resources to identify sex offenders than they do.
Just this morning I was talking to someone whose co-worker has a hard time getting jobs because if you do a Google search for his name, the first things that come up are articles about him being accused of being a rapist. Even though he was exonerated and some of the articles do mention that at the bottom in small text, it has still had significant negative impacts on his life.
True, but the fact that they are falsely identifying people is very good information to know. The fact that they don't have a good policy for fixing their mistakes is good to know. It gives users one more reason to move on to a more responsible site before they've invested more effort into that social network.
MySpace is clearly acting to deceive the public. They're intentionally taking actions they know will be ineffective at solving the problem in an attempt to trick users into thinking they have made real progress. At the same time they're misidentifying innocent people and not properly dealing with that problem. Basically they are being a big evil business. If being purchased by Fox news was not enough reason, this is just one more reason to distrust and avoid MySpace and that is news everyone should be hearing so they can decide for themselves.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Today's a good day- I can make light of it. Catch me on a bad day and I'll be in a foul mood for a week after one of their harassing phone calls.
In the end she'll work it out, I'm sure- if all else the press generated will pressure the company to reinstate the profile. Which is as the system should be."
The thing I would wonder about...what all other 'databases' are now being filled with information from MySpace? I'd bet you 10 to nothing this lady now turns up as a sex offender on other systems....other systems that may NOT get their data corrected.
Isn't that nice? It would be a shame for this inacurate information to catch up to her in the future, denying her a job, a clearance, a loan...raise her insurance rates...all those nice things that bad data can do to you these days.
I guarantee you ...the info pulled off MySpace indentifying predators...it also being distributed to at least a few police, state and fed systems. Of course you have nothing to fear if you are innocent? Try telling that to her in the future..when she gets mis-identified again due to data from this data pull....hell, she might not even know she's been turned down for something due to this...no one says they have to tell you why.
Re:How is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the article, although the user wants her myspace account back, I believe the bigger picture is that myspace is going to share the database of sex offenders (or those they atleast thing are, whether or not they are correct) with the state attorneys general. This, in the long run, could come back and cause serious problems for an individual who is in fact not a sex offender, and never was.
Just wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately, a woman (Score:5, Insightful)
Think he could've escaped the witchhunt?
Can we quit with the whole sex offender thing now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
As TFA points out, MySpace provides list of users whose accounts it deletes for such reasons to law enforcement. It's very unlikely that the Colorado AG's office had Ms. Davis listed as a sex offender since the offenses were committed by a different person in other states; now, quite possibly now it does.
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?
Her name is Jessica Davis, for God's sake. There are probably at least two people with that name in the US who share a birthday for every single day of the year! If she had a (much) rarer name I could see why this happened; and I can see why an automated records check might have turned up her name as someone to look at, but presumably a human being had to make this decision, and any human being with an ounce of sense would have realized that name and birth month is not nearly enough for a match in this case.
(arguments about an 18 year old with his 16 year old high school sweetheart getting tagged as a "registered sex offender" aside)
"Arguments about the three thousand dead people aside, September 11th 2001 was a really nice day!"
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.
When MySpace starts acting like the government, and in cooperation with the government, it's no longer just filling the role of a private corporation. If you're not a cop, you probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about things like probable cause and Miranda warnings -- but if you go around gossiping about how you think one of your neighbors is a child molester because he has the same name as somebody you read about in the papers, you're still going to be liable when events run their course and the false arrest suit is filed.
Blacklist them all! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
At the same time, however (and if memory serves correctly), libel cases have been rare in recent years and have not had great success at trial.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
These sorts of associations are nothing to trifle with.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's funny is that this is exactly what all of us predicted would happen: a lot of false positives and people wondering why their profiles were yanked---probably without actually stopping a single actual sex offender from doing anything illegal.
What makes this even funnier is that the sex offenders using their legitimate names (assuming they aren't complete idiots) are the ones we should least worry about. They are identifying who they are, which means that if they do something wrong, law enforcement can easily determine their identities. The LAST thing that government or MySpace should be doing is punishing those who aren't breaking any laws or trying to conceal their identities. They are effectively telling sex offenders that because they made a mistake in the past, they can never have a place in civilized society again unless they break the law and pretend to be someone else. In essence, they are directly encouraging further illegal behavior by former criminals. Apparently entrapment is legal if you're sneaky enough about it....
There's a reason that there are limitations on how long you can put someone in prison. You're supposed to do your penance, repay your debt to society, whatever, then be accepted back into society. By creating these artificial barriers, the legal system is effectively shutting them out, which will, in turn, cause them to not consider themselves members of society, and will encourage behavior outside the accepted norms for decent society. Indeed, it has been shown repeatedly that criminals who are reintegrated into society without being treated like outcasts are less likely to be repeat offenders.
How is this really any different from indentured servitude for debts? Make a mistake and pay for it for the rest of your life. There's a reason we have laws to limit the amount of time that somebody can get screwed over for financial mistakes, and with the exception of wacko stunts like this, those same limits apply to crimes of all sorts. I think it is long past time that we stopped using "think of the children" as a boogeyman for getting all sorts of abusive laws passed that affect the freedom of everyone in this great nation. If we allow one person's MySpace profile to be yanked, whether actual sex offenders or just people incorrectly identified, it is no different than allowing everyone's profiles to be yanked. After all, you could make money through that MySpace profile. What's to stop the next purge to be anyone who has ever defaulted on a credit card payment? You could use it to distribute messages to Al Qaeda through steganography in images on your profile. What's to stop the removal of profiles of anyone who has ever downloaded an encryption program? Where does it end?
It's time for MySpace users to tell MySpace that they won't be bullied before it gets out of hand.
Re:Can we quit with the whole sex offender thing n (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to think this is about protecting people. It's not, it's about corporate PR. It is certainly in MySpace's PR interest to have no one who appears to be a known sex offender on their site. And that's what this policy prevents.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't an accurate statement. From a government standpoint, she hasn't been labeled anything. That is correct. However, this is not an issue of government at all.
When I am in high school and called a "nerd" I am identified, branded or labeled as such. It doesn't matter that the administration of the school doesn't recognize that my name now hashes to a pool of "nerds". What matters is that other people have labeled me, rightly or wrongly.
Similarly, if MySpace labels someone a sex offender the government's official registry is largely irrelevant to the fact that within the bounds of MySpace that person is now "branded" a sex offender. In legal terms, they're completely innocent and need not worry about being in some government database as one. In realistic terms they're baffled/confused/shocked/traumatized to discover that they've been labeled something they are not.
Don't underestimate the power of "unofficial" labels, brands, or identifications.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. She cannot and will not be added to any sex offender lists or any other governmentally maintained lists because of this. She is not a sex offender.
Isn't that nice? It would be a shame for this inacurate information to catch up to her in the future, denying her a job, a clearance, a loan...raise her insurance rates...all those nice things that bad data can do to you these days.
Except it won't, because she is not a sex offender. And you know what? Some searches for things like mortgages, background checks, due diligence legal searches, and so on, are (intentionally) overly broad and do get "false positives". But the difference is they don't just assume you're that person; if you're not that person, you're simply not, and you are given the opporunity to show it. This is routine and happens thousands of times a day for employment, divorce proceedings, security clerance investigations, credit checks, and so on. MySpace doesn't really care, apparently, if it purges a few people who aren't really sex offenders. But it's not the reverse that's happening
I guarantee you
Um...huh? You actually believe that police records and sex offender lists and government databases are going to be changed on the basis of MySpace's garbage matching...using sex offender lists in the first place? (Not only will this not happen, at all, do you see the error in your logic here? MySpace isn't "identifying" sex offenders. They're letting the people who pressured them know that they removed people who they THINK to be sex offenders based on its processes, to show that it is doing something; not that these people ARE sex offenders.) She CANNOT and WILL NOT have ANY negative entries in any databases or law enforcement records, because she HAS NOT committed any crime, and IS NOT a sex offender, no matter what MySpace says or does. Why does no one here understand that, and why are they all getting modded up? Repeat: MySpace has NO POWER to suddenly make people appear as sex offenders or criminals in ANY database, ANYWHERE.
That doesn't mean what MySpace is doing is right or even productive. But it also doesn't change the accuracy of anything I said above.
to all the people who say no big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Your Rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Can we quit with the whole sex offender thing n (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Major malfunction (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I'm sorry, even in Asshat County, they have the same mechanisms for checking for criminal records, outstanding warrants, and so on. Even if there were a newspaper story about this, it would be about how she was wrongly identified as a sex offender by MySpace, not that she actually is one. She won't be added to any sex offender or other law enforcement databases. She won't have a criminal record. She hasn't been convicted of a related crime.
And even if she WAS a registered sex offender, she wouldn't be thrown in jail at a traffic stop. Getting into the whole "well, if they knew she was a registered sex offender, they might harass her" area is shaky ground. Just because you THINK they might or because cops sometimes do the wrong thing isn't really relevant or meaningful to this situation.
But that's beside the point, because she isn't a registered sex offender, and won't be added to any list or database that any police agency - even in Asshat County - searches. And let's take this situation in particular. Let's just say for some reason that this story is in Bodunk Times-Ledger in Asshat County. This whole thing about how this woman was incorrectly identified as a sex offender via MySpace. For one thing, the only reason it's public is because she chose to make it public. And second, the whole story is that she is improperly identified as a sex offender because she shares a name and a similar birthdate and lives in a neighboring state, not that she actually is a sex offender.
Look, I know you're trying to imagine the slipperiest slope possible. That MySpace's "list" could somehow become public, and might somehow be misused. But the criminal and judicial systems and databases in this country are pretty damned accurate. If you do have the misfortune of sharing the same exact name, birthdate, and even city/state as a real criminal, there are even ways out of that. But the legal/criminal standard is much, much, much higher than the crap, purposely inexact matching MySpace is using. People don't just randomly get criminal records, warrants, or added to state-maintained sex offender databases just because of what MySpace is doing, and that's not even the purpose of this; in fact, it's the exact opposite: MySpace is contracting with a database company to try to match its users against existing, legitimate sex offender databases. No matter how poorly of a job it does, it isn't making the information public, and the information isn't intended to say that someone is a sex offender, just that they think a particular profile may match someone who already has legitimately been identified as a sex offender by the legal and judicial systems.
But no one is going to get tossed in jail in Asshat County because of what MySpace is doing. Not unless Asshat County wants to spend its entire year's highway budget on the inevitable settlement payout. And not only that, Asshat County will never find out, because that person will never be in any legitimate criminal database, nor can be legitimately considered to be a target of investigation, because MySpace's matching mechanism isn't coming from thin air; it's coming from legitimate databases that already exist, and aren't designed to be some sort of "new" list, and aren't even intended to be public, much less remotely to be used for any law enforcement purpose.
Re:It's a good thing, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)