FTC Warns Site Not To Sell Personal Data 120
itwbennett writes "The US Federal Trade Commission has warned two people associated with a now-defunct magazine and Web site for gay teens and young men that they would violate the privacy promises the publication made to subscribers by selling their personal information during a bankruptcy proceeding. The FTC, in a letter sent earlier this month, also suggested that the owners of XY Magazine and XY.com would be violating the privacy standards the company had in place before shutting down if they used the subscribers' personal information in a relaunch of the magazine or website. The personal information is listed as part of the debtor's estate in a New Jersey bankruptcy proceeding for Peter Ian Cummings, editor and founder of the magazine. Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
Mr Cummings (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mr Cummings (Score:4, Informative)
. The original FTC letter [ftc.gov] also makes for an interesting read. They seem to rely both upon the original privacy statements and a broader sense of "fair play" in making their judgement.
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Even funnier, his name is Peter Cummings!
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Does their logo look like a vulva, or is it just me?
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Kinda funny, really. I'm opposed to most gay rights bullshit - especially marriage. But - I agree with the FTC. Sensitive information of this nature should NOT be divulged, period. No qualifiers, no quantifiers, nothing. Just don't do it.
As for the pink pistols - it's just to gay to consider. Peter puffers with pistols, ROFLMAO Oh well - seriously - if they are American citizens, OF COURSE they have the right to keep and bear arms, and to defend themselves from assholes. But, I'll be laughing all da
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Well it does indicate that someone or something is about to get penetrated with a round cylindrical object. It's a shooting stance. ;)
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Ok I assume that moderation is by either an anti-gun nut or a queer basher. Bite me.
Yet the US gov got Birthday Club data (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrell's_Ice_Cream_Parlour [wikipedia.org]
The data an American ice cream parlor chain was used to warn young men to register for the draft before their 18th birthday in the early 1980's.
It was all a big Google (mistake) when exposed.
Bad Comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
Even the submission says it's because the company in question had privacy policies in place prior to going bankrupt. They would be violatinig said policies if they give away or sell the data. Listing it as 'assets' in bankrupcy court when they weren't supposed to sell it in the first place was a mistake by them.
The Selective Service has no such polcies.
Re:Bad Comparison (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty typical for any and all contractual obligations over an asset to be tossed in a bankruptcy court. E.g. say you had a patent which you'd sold thousands of covenants not to sue for, in bankruptcy ownership of the patent may be transferred without the obligation not to sue.
The FTC's recommendation is unusual and surprising and I'd expect it to be ignored or fail if challenged in court.
Re:Bad Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
The FTC's recommendation is unusual and surprising and I'd expect it to be ignored or fail if challenged in court.
It's going to be a pretty interesting storm if this fails if challenged in court, because it creates a semi-legal avenue for personal information harvesting, bypassing just about all privacy laws (barring perhaps things like HIPAA).
In slashdot terms:
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1. Set up facebook-like site with really good privacy rules.
2. Let site grow with lots of safe personal details
3. ???Don't go bankrupt???
4. PROFIT!
-
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It's hard to go bankrupt and then go to step 4 profit. Those are sort of exclusive steps.
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Not really, set up service provider A and client company B. B does all the public work while racking up a huge debt to A. B goes bankrupt and sells off private data in order to pay A. A makes a huge profit.
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Or that he won't really care about the privacy concerns. Other than that, as long as the bankruptcy isn't a premeditated way to rip off creditors, he won't likely care.
Now, if B goes bankrupt owing a lot of other creditors, he would likely see through it as a fraud and and make sure the other creditors are paid first. He'd still probably allow the sale of the personal data.
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I would call that "hard", but I agree that could be done.
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Should datamining be a criminal offense?
I mean, there is this big effort building laws and international standards surrounding and protecting the copyright on databases - perhaps the act of accumulating and correlating personal information in the first place needs to be examined and attached to the same infrastructure?
If you value privacy, then it seems to me that legal restrictions are the logical endgame - as more and more databases of aliases are interconnected and more of our lives moves to online servi
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Perhaps we should just recognize that personal data is the property of the person it's about. The same corporations that buy and sell personal data routinely claim things like price lists and vendor contacts as proprietary and even threaten to sue over disclosures.
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So we can expect a Microsoft bankruptcy at any moment then?
Re:Bad Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's pretty typical for any and all contractual obligations over an asset to be tossed in a bankruptcy court."
However, it's not so simple when an asset held by the bankrupt company wasn't really theirs to sell in the first place. Suppose they had a fleet of cars which were leased. If they go bankrupt during the lease, they have to give the cars back, and cannot sell them.
In a sense, the personal information was leased to company; it was never theirs to sell and shouldn't become theirs to sell just because of bankruptcy.
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However, it's not so simple when an asset held by the bankrupt company wasn't really theirs to sell in the first place. Suppose they had a fleet of cars which were leased. If they go bankrupt during the lease, they have to give the cars back, and cannot sell them.
Ok, but the company can (depending on the lease terms) sell the lease to someone else.
In a sense, the personal information was leased to company; it was never theirs to sell and shouldn't become theirs to sell just because of bankruptcy.
No. Persona
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"Ok, but the company can (depending on the lease terms) sell the lease to someone else."
And in this case, the terms did not include the right to sell.
"No. Personal information is data, it isn't subject to lease. Little bits of personal information aren't even subject to copyright."
Ever heard of the word "analogy"? Of course it's not an actual lease. The point is if the company didn't have the right to sell or distribute a given asset, contract, patent, copyright, or whatever before going bankrupt, bankrup
Re:Bad Comparison (Score:4, Informative)
"The moral of the story is DON'T GIVE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO OTHERS."
It's rather difficult to have things delivered to you without giving them your name and address. They tend to want credit card info as well.
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"In a sense, the personal information was leased to company...."
In a sense, I am levitating on a force-field right now - of course, that "force field" is created by the atoms of the chair.
In a sense the data was leased; unfortunately that "sense" is not in the sense of the law, or the sense of GAAP, or any "sense" that is legally binding on the company or the bankruptcy court.
What is needed is for companies that collect your data to EXPLICITLY state, as a part of the contract you enter into prior to them co
Re:Bad Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the things I noticed re. Copyright law (a favorite subject for Slashdot, of course): I ran across the copyright indexes of several authors, such as H. P. Lovecraft, who were big on only giving magazines first publication rights, not the standard 'all rights' clause in contracts. Lovecraft was part of the amateur press scene of his time and actually wrote articles about it, aimed at new authors, plus he metioned it in several letters to fellow authors. HPL also died during the depression, and if you look at the copyright history of his work, a lot of stories pass from a single magazine such as Weird Tales, through many different small companies' hands, before the rights ended up being purchased by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei after the depression ended.
It looks like a bunch of small presses bought republication rights from magazines such as Weird Tales that the magazine may not have actually owned to sell, and passed these around in one standard contract after another. It looks very strange to see four stories published in the same magazine the same year, all passing through different small press owners hands, with a bunch of corporate names that are all swiftly out of existence, have little or no actual publication history, or seem to maybe be nothing but shell corporations. You have to wonder, if Lovecraft is any indicator, if Weird Tales actually took the time to sell off rights to thousands of old stories one at a time, to literally hundreds of separate companies, instead of bundling them somehow. The explanation seems to be that at least some of these contracts came out of bankruptcy courts, which were working overtime in that era. Unfortunately, only a few of these documents have good paper trails, and it's hard to really prove one way or another.
Given the middle of the Great Depression connection, I've wondered if this was because bankruptcy courts were distributing these assets as part of big pools of similar fluff, without taking the time to check all the details on items they doubtless felt were of little real worth. Probably they were focusing on the physical assets of the companies, where those existed, and didn't expect these 'IP' assets to ever come back into print.
This may bear out what the OP wrote. In practice, the bankruptcy courts seem to sometimes ignore restrictions in contract whether that's really what the law says to do or not, particularly if the asset is perceived as having little value compared to the rest of what the court has to deal with.
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This shouldn't be surprising at all. At least not if you understanding the concept of responsbility. Yes, the names and addresses of the magazine's subscribers and the sites users are an "asset"... but with that asset come responsibilities. There are strings attached to this data, and those strings are the terms under which it was originally gathered.
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Lists of this sort are a very serious responsibility a
Re:Yet the US gov got Birthday Club data (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. Stop trying to invent a new /. meme. It's not even funny.
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http://google-au.blogspot.com/2010/07/were-sorry.html [blogspot.com] is also fun reading about doing something interesting until exposed.
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Uh, Mr. Balmer? You misspelled "Bing".
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It was all a big Google (mistake) when exposed
I see what you did there.
Wow, I've never heard of a Bing (stupid) fanboy before. How much does Bing (stupid) pay for Google-bombing these days? Clearly, Bing (stupid) is getting desperate...
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I remember that. My friend and I made up a fictitious friend so we could get an extra birthday sundae each year. Boy were we shocked when we got a Selective Service letter for our "friend" when he "turned 18."
I think that was a couple of years before I tried to use a $2 bill at Taco Bell.
Censorship Software would help protect Children (Score:4, Insightful)
Most teenagers shouldn't have anything to worry about because responsible parents will have programs like Cyber Patrol and CYBERsitter installed to prevent their children and teenagers from accessing these sexually oriented sites. It's funny because under the Australian Internet filter this type of situation wouldn't even be an issue.
[I'll spell this out early on here. I am not a Troll, just offering some political sarcasm, thank you very much. Remember, your Nanny loves you and only wants what's best for YOU].
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[Remember, your Nanny loves you and only wants what's best for YOU].
The last cyber-nanny who wanted What's Best For Me was working for SHODAN, and tried to rip me apart with lasers for trying to hurt the egg pods of The Many. Hilarity ensued.
Re:I'm from future (Score:5, Insightful)
Self-debasing humor aside, you have rather a significant difference between a site like Slashdot selling out, and a magazine for gay teens.
Most notably, paying for and receiving a physical magazine means the company has your name, CC info, and physical address; Slashdot has a dynamic IP address, a largely anonymous handle, a throwaway contact email address that likely filled with spam and died at least five years ago, and knows my default comment threshold.
Not to mention, society doesn't stigmatize geekdom (these days) quite the same way it does homosexuality. Although I find the Slashdot crowd far more tolerant of such issues than the general public, our "perverse love" of technology rarely gets us lynched.
Think positively (Score:5, Funny)
Well, think positively. As more and more people grow up with CS and clones and other online games, soon we'll have a whole generation who thinks "gay" means "got more than one kill with a sniper rifle" or "won the roll on a piece of loot you wanted too".
And for that matter than "I fucked your mom" is the new "good morning, sir. How do you do?" I can imagine a business meeting in 2020 going something like:
CEO: "And now Mr Stevens the VIP of marketing will present the results from the latest market poll."
Stevens: "I fucked your moms, ladies and gentlemen."
Chorus: "Your mom's fat."
Stevens: "As you can see on this graph, after our latest PR campaign, our brand recognition has risen by almost 20% and the sales by nearly 10%."
PHB from the audience: "Dude, you're gay."
Stevens: "Thank you."
At any rate, they'll probably think that having been subscribed to a gay magazine is like subscribing to some gaming tricks site ;)
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Yes, well, homophobia in the USA is something sad and something I still don't rightly "get". I'll agree that it's a serious problem and didn't mean to imply otherwise. But my train of thought is really a bunch of clown cars chasing each other, and throwing pies at each other, and occasionally I get funny slapstick ideas like that about just about any kind of topic.
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Not to mention, society doesn't stigmatize geekdom (these days) quite the same way it does homosexuality.
I'm an old nerd, and even though (as I said quite a while ago in a BSFW journal [slashdot.org]) "About the time crack cocaine was being invented, being a nerd was starting to become somewhat acceptable. Apparently the crackheads took over our role as social pariahs."
But even back when being a nerd was unacceptable, being homosexual was worse. Few gays were out of the closet, and if I'd been gay I'd have stayed in the c
I have just one thing to say (Score:5, Funny)
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Where do the subscribers live these days then? (Score:5, Funny)
"Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
And this changed how exactly after the bankrupcy of the magazine?
Maybe a bankrupcy of slashdot would be a good thing for the readers too ...
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"Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
And this changed how exactly after the bankrupcy of the magazine?
While the subscriber was regularly getting the magazine in its black shrink wrapped form, they knew to look out for it, about what time it would arrive, etc. That ended when the magazine folded, and the subscriber is no longer expecting it to arrive. Or the subscriber has moved on, to college and/or their own place. Suddenly, without expectation, a new mailing arrives. Even if it has the black shrink wrap, the original subscriber is now not there, or even if there, might not be acting in a timely manner
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"Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
And this changed how exactly after the bankrupcy of the magazine?
That's just it: it has probably changed a decent amount. If the original subscribers are not living with their parents, they are considering selling the subscribers' parents' addresses now. It could happen with any data sale, but I think that's the reason that the OP pointed out that the subscribers lived with their parents at that time.
Promises (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding was that the US doesn't have anything like the UK Data Protection Act [wikipedia.org] so the company wouldn't actually be doing anything illegal.
Are these promises worth anything? Would it even constitute a breach of contract, i.e. be grounds for a civil action?
Re:Promises (Score:4, Informative)
The FTC has actually filed civil lawsuits against multiple companies that the agency thought didn't live up to their privacy promises. The FTC sees the act of breaking privacy promises as a deceptive trade practice that's outlawed in the FTC Act.
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Re:Promises (Score:4, Interesting)
The data is still in the hands of the original owners. By filing this with the BK court, the FTC has established that it is illegal (unless another party's argument can prevail, and this would most likely have to be litigated in a separate venue, not in BK) for the sale to be made. Effectively, the subscribers have a lien on the data, which amounts to an ownership of the right sale, held by the subscribers themselves, in absence. Selling it might then be considered no different than the sale of stolen goods (which even a BK court cannot do).
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Selling it might then be considered no different than the sale of stolen goods (which even a BK court cannot do).
Tell that to SCO and Judge Gross
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Interesting [bbc.co.uk]:
Mr Davies said that the UK Information Commissioner had an obligation to protect any British citizens who may be on the database.
"I would argue that this is a case where the Information Commissioner should write directly to the US and ensure action is taken."
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Right. We know that justice - or rather the law - can reach across the Atlantic. But from what I've seen, it's somewhat a one-way street, and it runs the other way.
Is it a "promise" or a "contract?" (Score:2, Informative)
There is nothing preventing a company from changing its privacy policy after it has obtained your private information. Hell, there's no law requiring that they even adhere to their own privacy policy.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Nothing except the threat of a lawsuit filed by the FTC. The agency has brought several similar cases.
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Surely that means the FTC are a joke since they let them (and you can add most telcos to the list) get away with it.
It Would Be A Nice Precedent (Score:2)
I can't recall any other case where government forced enforcement of privacy policy on third parties like bankruptcy courts. Even here, it is not clear if FTC is threatening action or just bluffing.
I remember the case of a hospital that stored medical records in a warehouse. They stopped paying rent and the landlord sold the file cabinets including contents to help recover his losses. The cabinets, folders and paper are physical property and property laws govern them. The information on the papers had
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I remember the case of a hospital that stored medical records in a warehouse. They stopped paying rent and the landlord sold the file cabinets including contents to help recover his losses. The cabinets, folders and paper are physical property and property laws govern them. The information on the papers had no legal standing at all.
Even HIPPA laws do not apply to parties who are not heath care providers or their agents but who have possesion of patient data nevertheless.
It's the hospital that would be buste
Usage as intended by the persons providing it ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Such subscriber information is *not* just a list of NAW data. By its origin a quite important private piece of information is tagged to each-and-every of those peoples records : They are homosexual.
If-and-when the list is used for its *by the subscribers* intended purpose (to be able to send the magazine and subscription-fee invoices to their subscribers) there is no problem.
But if this list is *not* used for that purpose it should fall faul of the current rules regarding the aggregation of peoples data :
FormerMember (Score:1, Informative)
First off, I used to be a member of that website, until it rolled downhill and everyone started using other social networks.
The magazines were non pornographic and aimed at gay youth. They didn't feature nudity and were sold at stores like chapters.
It had TONS of subscribers and at one point I would have believed it to be the largest gay social network. Not everyone would have their financial information or true information on the site, although it did end up possessing a ton of information about users.
Gasp! OMBFG! You can't sell what isn't yours?!?! (Score:2)
Another day, another Kosian post on Slashdot.
You can't sell what isn't yours to sell. Period.
No story here. Oh, it's about gays or computers or ...
This is the year 2010. The novelty of being gay or involving computers is so Carter administration.
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One of the targets of the FTC letter is the majority owner of the company that published XY (as the story says). The other target of the letter was an investor in XY. The assert ownership of the data.
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Hmmm...well...that's more interesting than I first thought. One way to view this is the FTC is trying to prevent selling of assets because there was a privacy clause? I guess they'd pursue this as fraud?
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You can't sell what isn't yours to sell. Period.
Yes, but is it your information they're holding for a particular purpose (sending you a magazine), and thus your property or is it their information simply about you, and thus their property?
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That's irrelevant. The information is an asset and they aren't free to dispose of the assets.
Addresses are not private property, even if the road and all surrounding land are private property. Addresses are a function of license to use the road which comes from the government.
It's similar to the way a font can be copyrihted but IP ownership of letters, themselves, is impossible.
No, the cat does not, in fact, "got my tongue." (Score:1)
It's interesting how government upholds private contracts when it wants to, and violates them when it wants to, as in the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, which involved overturning longstanding, traditional contracts with lenders to give certain lenders a larger share of the cut-up pie upon dissolution.
Peter S. Chamberlain Re Sale Private Web Data (Score:1)
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Given that a petition is an attempt to change the law, people who sign one should be prepared to stand behind it. If you'll pardon the expression.
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Of course you have to make your views public if you want to participate in a democracy. Everything but your vote should be public.
Especially political petitions. If you sign a petition, you are expressly making a public statement of your views on a subject. Otherwise, signatures on a petition could never be challenged.
Why would you sign a petition and then expect the fact that you signed a petition to be priv
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I disagree. Anonymous votes (and petitions are the same in this case) protect people from coercion, and therefore is freer.
If petitions (and other votes) are open, you might be compelled to sign them for other reasons other than your political beliefs.
Re:The morals of outing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true that sometimes people do fear retribution for political actions, and justifiably so, but the only way to foster an open discourse, where social norms don't favor revenge or retribution, is to be open about one's beliefs and contribute to healthy debate.
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Sadly you are mistaken. People do not reconsider beliefs often. In fact attempting to change deeply held convictions can cause cognitive dissonance since many other decisions have been based on that belief. In fact, people with deeply held beliefs often hold those beliefs even more strongly in the face of proof to the contrary. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/ [boston.com]
But that is beside the point. There is no petition here, this article is about the potential outin
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That is all nice if you assume you live in an open society where debate is accepted and people respect others' contrary opinions. But the reality is often very different.
How many people have been persecuted or at least ostracized for defending different views that the majority? How many kids have been discriminated for their parents' opinions?
Social pressure alone is enough to ensure that people, if forced to openly defend their opinions, and especially if they have children or other close family, will pref
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Anonymous votes (and petitions are the same in this case)
Well no, a petition is not a vote. There is the important difference in that a vote is open to all, scheduled, and is usually a periodic or reactionary thing. A petition is pro-active, and self-selective. A vote shows you the will of the majority. A petition shows you the voice of the minority. You don't need a petition if you can get more then half the populace to sign it.
It didn't make sense to me at first, but secret voting does seem to be a good idea. It fixes some of the problems we've had in the pa
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I assumed they would have to be accessed by a court or whatever to verify it, but not to the general public, if requested by the person that signed it.
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Outing people who work to deny others civil rights is a bit different from outing people who were not organizing to do so.
Re:The morals of outing (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is trying to prevent people from exercising their civil rights. They are, however, trying to prevent people from perverting an existing institution designed to build families.
So would you be in favour of prohibiting the marriage of heterosexual persons who do not plan on raising children?
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There are absolutely no gay marriages that can build a proper family.
Really? Reality is disagreeing with you.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-3153v1 [aappublications.org]
http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx [apa.org]
If you can read German or Spanish, here's a couple more
1 [bmj.bund.de]
2 [gipuzkoa.ehu.es]
I can link some more if you like.