LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
What's Your Sign? Got a Criminal Record?
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Monday, February 28 @ 17:11:19 EST Privacy
This gem of an article by Declan McCullagh outlines a lobbying strategy by an Internet dating service corporation seeking legislation to require criminal background checks for "social referral services." McCullagh does a great job slashing holes in the specifics of this proposal, so I will leave that to him. Briefly, this proposal would require a warning -- in a 12-point font -- that no background check was conducted, perhaps giving an advantage to True.com. It already runs such checks; in fact this check and a marriage scan are its business model.

The rationale for the law is quite different though. True.com claims 20% of Internet users think some dating sites already run these checks. That's right -- 20%. I am just dying to see this survey. They must have rounded up the 5% of Internet users who enjoy spam. I thought everyone was deathly afraid of questionable suitors on Internet dating and feared the lack of screening. Certainly anyone who has gotten a few responses from a posting has filtered out some chaff. That's what the entire True.com business is based on. So tell me True.com: is the market (you) fixing this need or is there no need because the mistaken perception -- so dangerous we must warn everyone in 12-point font -- is that it is already occuring?

 
Related Links
· More about Privacy
· News by Rebecca Bolin


Most read story about Privacy:
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

No Comments Allowed for Anonymous, please register

Re: What's Your Sign? Got a Criminal Record? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, February 28 @ 20:16:53 EST
California Sponsor: Asm. Fran Pavley (assemblymember.pavley@assembly.ca.gov)
Michigan Sponsor: Rep. Jim Howell (jhowell@house.mi.gov)
Texas Sponsor: Sen. John Corona (john.carona@senate.state.tx.us)
Virginia Sponsor: Rep. Joe T. May (Del_May@house.state.va.us)

Tell these legislators how foolish this is.



Re: What's Your Sign? Got a Criminal Record? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, March 03 @ 12:16:17 EST
Aside from the other problems with this proposed legislation, mandating a particular point size for a warning in Web and e-mail messages is pretty clueless. Many advocates of flexible, accessible Web authoring oppose the use of hardcoded point sizes, preferring more adaptable measures like percentages and ems based on the user's browser configuration, but this would have no way of guaranteeing a particular point size as mandated by legislation. As for e-mail alerts, many people favor use of plain-text e-mail, which of course has no settings for font size other than the recipients' individual configurations.



Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die
grotesque-variorum

LawMeme articles published after May 1, 2005 are subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 License.

Contributors retain copyright interests in all comments and stories or submissions on or before May 1, 2005.
Access to material before May 1, 2005 is subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0. grotesque-variorum

The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-05 by the Information Society Project.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.870 Seconds