MySpace to ‘block sex offenders’:
Social networking website MySpace says it will release tools to identify and block US sex offenders from its site.
Anyone else think it’s weird to specify “US” sex offenders? Like, what? Canadian child molesters are OK?
Oh, who am I kidding. There are no child molesters in Canada. As we all know, Canada is the beautiful land of happy people and lots of space to be free and have universal healthcare and lots of pot and gay sex.
Any idea if Canada requires sex offender registration as the US does?
Yes, we have a registry in Canada as well.
Maybe myspace just can’t enforce rules that apply to Canada too? Beyond their jurisdiction or something?
Perhaps the information isn’t available to the public. The sex offender’s register in the UK is, AFAIK, limited to police access only.
Wired news has more info on this whole topic. One of their guys wrote up a program using the US database to search MySpace for registered offenders based on their reported zip code or something. They ended up helping to catch one guy and put him in jail or something with the police.
So they bugged MySpace a ton about it and I’m betting they are now using the program Wired released to do it. or making something similiar
they’d need to write up a new program or adjust it to work with Canada’s database (if they can get it) and Canada’s postal codes, etc.
My guess is that it’s a jurisdiction thing since MySpace is based in the US, they block US sex offenders. Either that or they’re afraid if they block the US and Canadian sex offenders, they’ll be afraid they’ll have to do the same for the rest of the world too.