Facebook Put’s the SmackDown on Child Predators
Published by Rodney Rumford October 14th, 2008 in Facebook.
Keeping social eco-systems such as Facebook safe form the leeches in society takes determination and a concerted effort. Facebook has just announced that they are taking significant steps in this direction in the area of child predators.
Facebooks chief communication officer Barry Schnitt “We commit to checking new and existing users against the resulting database of sex offender email addresses and IM handles as often as the technology allows. We’ll also be working with law enforcement to help identify and prosecute violators of the new law. Basically, we’re issuing a challenge to others in the industry on this.”
According to Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer: “At Facebook, we’ve long barred registered sex offenders from our service. Currently, we work cooperatively with individual states’ attorneys general to check users against state-registered sex offender lists. Unfortunately, we both consistently find that these registries lack the essential email and IM data for comprehensive and rapid screening. The process is also less efficient and less effective than anyone, especially concerned parents, would like, which is why we’re such ardent supporters of the KIDS Act Registry.
We see KIDS as an important tool to prevent inappropriate outreach from ever occurring. The penalties and consequences for registrants violating KIDS’ provisions are so severe, we hope they’ll deter potential predators from coming online altogether. This is a vital step in protecting children online, and it is by no means the end of our efforts
Our goal is to connect people online in a safe and secure environment. We’ll add the KIDS Act registry to our many existing safeguards and use the database as vigorously and comprehensively as we can. Specifically, we will check new users at sign-up and review existing users as regularly as the technology allows. Anyone on the list will be prevented from joining Facebook. Anyone already on Facebook who is added to the list will have his or her account disabled forever. End of story.”
You can read additional details on the facebook blog.
There are many problems with this.
First, this relies on sex offenders being on the registry. About 90% of all new sex crimes are committed by someone who is NOT on the registry, in other words, it is a first time offense.
Second, it relies on everybody on the registry being totally honest about what ALL their identifiers are. Those who are trying to comply with this law are not the ones you need to worry about. The ones to worry about are those NOT complying. And that would be easy to do.
Third, there are problems with this legislation. It is like giving the government the right to open all your mail. It is a most basic infringement of privacy.
Fourth, what about the children who are on the registry? In Wisconsin, they have an eight year old on the registry. In Texas, they are pursuing a case of a 13 year old who received (unsolicited) a questionable photo on his cell phone from a classmate. If convicted, he’ll be on the registry. Do we ban those kids too?
And lastly, we are relying on the government database to be totally, 100% accurate. The registries are not accurate as they stand! It has been estimated that 25% of the information on the registry is inaccurate. What if they type in one wrong character? It’s YOUR email they may list as belonging to a registered sex offender! Think it can’t happen? There have been totally innocent people, who are not even involved with a sex offender targeted for vandalism because they were listed as an address where a registered sex offender lived.
It can happen to you, folks!