Think of the children…

Written by vidarlo on 20070804 in english and privacy and rants with no comments.

Some people like to think of the children. That’s fine. What disturbs me is the fact that they overlook others civil rights in favour of the rights of the children.

It might be true that children ain’t to good at protecting their own rights, but that does not mean we should give them carte Blanche to accuse anyone of pedophilia or grooming, like some sites seems to do.

In my opinion such sites can never solve the problem, because they carries no judicial power, nor is the evidence they hold particularly useful. There’s also the problem of data integrity. Anyone can submit information into the database. What if I make a script that harvests nicknames and e-mail addresses from some social networking site, a IRC channel or such, and feed that into the database over a months time-span, preferably via e.g. something like tor. Suddenly, the site returns false positive if friends check real friends. The trust of the site will plummet.

A net identity is also easy to change. It takes from a few seconds and up to a minute. What’s even better is that the groomer can check the database himself. If he’s in it, change. If not, don’t bother yet. He does not need to change without reason.

So I fail to see how such a site can make any big difference. If it is truly a criminal matter, the complaints should be forwarded to the police. If it is not a truly criminal matter, I fail to see how such a site will make any big difference… Sadly.

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