Here’s one of those stories that just freaks me out.  According to this article a man in Virginia is suing one of his neighbors and a company that provides access to a database of sex offenders for a fee.

To give you a synopsis of the story, this poor guy was never accused or convicted of a sex crime, but apparently he lived at a house that at one time had been the address of a man convicted of a sex crime.  The state of Virginia relies on the sex offenders to inform it when they change addresses (huh?) and obviously in this case the offender didn’t.  So the Florida-based company, National Alert Registry, Inc., had a classic database problem: garbage in/garbage out.

The company provides access to its database and an email alert service for a fee. A woman named Michelle Myers subscribed to the service and that’s how she came across this guy’s name.  So off she went and broadcast the information to people in the neighborhood, school officials and the homeowners association.

Of course this guy is suing the woman and the company for slander.  The woman’s attorney is using the old "free speech" and "it’s just her opinion" defense, but the man’s attorney rightly states that the courts have consistently found that slander does not constitute free speech.

Now I’m sure that this woman will argue that she was simply going on bad information, but she could have easily verified the information by looking at freely available court records.  This guy may have lived at the address of a registered sex offender, but his name wasn’t associated with it at all.  If you’re going to accuse someone of something this serious you damn well better have your facts checked.

As for the company, I’m sure they’ll argue that they are the victim of faulty state records, but again how hard would it be for them to verify a name against an address?  I have no problem with tracking registered sex offenders, but it is very important that the companies that engage in this activity get it right…or else.

Lastly, what about the state of Virginia?  What the heck are they thinking?  They rely on a convicted criminal to keep them informed of his whereabouts?  What could possibly go wrong?

The point here is that all of our lives have become an open book.  Without much effort we can find information about anyone we want, and vice versa.  For instance, I can tell you from a simple search on the InfoUSA.com
website that Ms Myers, who started this whole mess, lives on a road called Blacksmith Arch, which is
confirmed by the newspaper article, that her phone number is (757)
766-22** (I’m intentionally not using the last two digits), that the average yearly income in her neighborhood is
$61,000-$100,000 and that the average price of homes in her neighborhood is $200,000-$249,900.

For the most part I think that having information freely available and in the public is a good thing, but the trade-off is that we must be very careful in how we use that information.  As anyone who’s been on the wrong side of a rumor can tell you it is very hard to get the right version of the story out since most people only hear the first version.  It is imperative that when someone gets it wrong they pay a heavy price, which is why I hope the company and Ms. Myers get slapped silly.