Someone Stop Facebook's Creepy Predators, Facebook Executive Implores
By day, Chris Kelly extols the virtues of Facebook, where he serves as chief privacy officer. By night, as candidate for California attorney general, Kelly warns of Facebook's "online predators," and says government must "keep people safe" Neat trick.
As part of his 2010 AG bid, Kelly emailed prospective supporters (see below), touting legislation that makes sex offenders register their social network identities. A similar law in New York recently revealed 2,782 sex offenders were using Facebook, some under multiple screen names. Democrat Kelly wants to uncover similar Facebook users out West, and asks people to email their legislators a message stating, "I urge you to pass e-STOP here in California to keep people safe from online predators."
Which is all well and good, but kind of begs the question: Since California already has a public sex offenders database, couldn't Facebook simply collect enough information from users to cross-reference that list? And if it doesn't do so, for privacy reasons, wouldn't executives like, say, the chief privacy officer be answerable for that apparently regrettable trade off between safety and revenue growth? Just asking!
Email from Kelly (click to enlarge):
Email Kelly suggests his supporters send (excerpt):
