WE are the kind of people you meet on the internet...

TechnoFascist | http: //arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070323-online-dating-bill-squashed-in-illinois-house.html (http://xrl.us/vfsq)

TechnoFascist | Don't you have an expectation when you pay $30 to find true love that it won't turn out to be a sex offender? asked Democratic Rep. John Bradley, according to STLToday, during a hearing in Illinois for the Internet Disclosure and Safety Awareness Act. The Illinois House Judiciary Committee shot down the bill (HB 563) this week which was introduced in February by Bradley. It would have required online dating sites offering services to citizens of the state to disclose whether or not they perform background checks on their members, and aimed to provide a feeling of safety among those users, armed with the knowledge that the other members were not criminals or sex offenders.

butterfly . o O ( How about teaching people to think for themselves rather than blindly trust anyone they meet on the internet? )

crouton says to butterfly, "amen!"

crouton solved that problem by not trusting anybody.

vixy says, "...do newspapers do background checks for their personal ads columns?"

SistaWendy [to vixy]: Not that I ever heard of.

butterfly [to vixy]: but it's the INTERNET OMG

SistaWendy says, "But... the Internet! It's everywhere! It's sexxxy and electric! It'll steal your cheeyuldrun!"

TechnoFascist says to SistaWendy, "yay!"

Doci says, "But everyone knows that ax-murderers don't advertise in newspapers!"

Doci says, "Because they're all on the internet."

SistaWendy grins at TechnoFascist.

TechnoFascist says to Doci, "newspaper ads are expensive. google adsense is MUCH more cost effective for today's ax-murderer on the go"

SistaWendy

Doci says to TechnoFascist, "Ahhh."

butterfly [to vixy]: The last time I heard about a proposal like that it was about background checks to see if people registered on the dating sites were MARRIED, and it was sponsored by one particular dating site that did do such checks and wanted to force all other sites that didn't to put 'We don't do background checks' on their front pages, so that they would triumph in the marketing wars.

vixy says to butterfly, "eesh."

butterfly doesn't remember if they won that or not.

butterfly does remember being seriously irked by said site's advertising, which was putting giant banner ads into rotation yelling "WE PROSECUTE MARRIED PEOPLE!" with insufficient context to necessarily recognise right away that they even were a dating site : )