Monday, June 11, 2007

Sex offender madness, Minnesota version

A few weeks ago I commented on the lunacy of MySpace's sex offender identification process. I know something about the way these matching algorithms work, and in the MySpace environment the test will have a low sensitivity and a low specificity. A substantial portion of those they identify will be false matches, and they'll miss most offenders.

When I ended my comments I predicted we'd see the authorities treating these lists as real, so that a false match by MySpace may mean a visit from the police. That was an easy one ...
Minnesota asks MySpace for list of sex offenders: 
... On Tuesday, Swanson became one of a number of state attorneys general to ask MySpace for the names of sex offenders from the 7,000 it says it has identified and expelled from its popular social networking website...
The best we can hope for is that MySpace is massively sued.
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2 comments:

  1. Michelle6/12/07, 3:00 PM

    Just take a look at the faces of some of these creeps
    http://registeredoffenderslist.org/blog/ and then you tell me if they look like they deserve privacy. The kids that were taken advantage of sure didn't get the luxury of privacy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JGF6/12/07, 5:34 PM

    Michelle, read the post again. The people I'm talking about are not sex offenders.

    ReplyDelete