Tag: SEX OFFENDERS

For the past few years, social network mega-sites Facebook and MySpace have been getting a little safer thanks to each making efforts to block sex offenders. Now, much of the rest of the Internet is getting the similar treatment, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announcing that 13 more sites are finally following suit, hooking into the state's database of sex offenders and filtering ...

Yesterday, New York City police identified and arrested a man wanted for public masturbation, thanks to one concerned citizen and her camera phone. According to the New York Daily News, 41-year-old Harlem resident Cileane White was minding her own business as she sat on the Number 3 subway train last Friday. Out of nowhere, from across the aisle, Kevin Bishop, 44, of the Bronx, exposed himself ...

Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed into law this week a bill that bans all registered sex offenders in his state from engaging in online social networking. The bill defines a social networking site as one containing: "profile web pages of the members," "photographs placed on the profile web pages," and "any other personal or personally identifying information." Taking effect in January, the bill ...

You can use an iPhone to locate restaurants, movie theaters, and even medical marijuana distributors. While those apps are helpful, a new application aims to make your neighborhood a safer place. The 'Offender Locator' will show a map of all registered sex offenders living in your neighborhood, according to Tech Crunch. By law, sex offenders must register on a free, public Web site. However, ...

This week, University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center released a new study (PDF) of online child predators, and some of its findings may surprise you. While the report tends to get a bit technical, it has some interesting facts, which we've broken down for you below. First off, even though the study estimates that there were approximately 3,715 arrests of online ...

In Vancouver, Washington, a homeless convicted sex offender has been charged with murder in the tragic slaying of 13-year-old Alycia Nipp. Darrin Sanford, convicted in 1998 of propositioning three youths between the ages of eight and 11, was released from prison last November and outfitted with a GPS monitoring device. After Sanford confessed to Nipp's murder, Clark County authorities used the ...

With so many people on Facebook (175 million by the Web site's own count), common sense tells us that not all of them are nice people. Thankfully, social networking companies are being proactive in their attempts to purge their sites of not-so-nice members (by not-so-nice we mean pedophiles). Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from it site since May 1, 2008, according to Connecticut's ...

From our "well intentioned, but crossing the line" file comes the tale of a law that will go into effect January 1, 2009 in Georgia that requires registered sex offenders to hand over usernames and passwords for any online service they subscribe to. The law is aimed at ensuring that sex offenders do not use the Internet to prey upon children or in other inappropriate ways. Of course, there are ...

We've reported on plenty of tools and services designed to help you locate nearby sex offenders, all designed with the hopes of enabling parents to keep their children safe. Critics of these tools often say that they can make those sex offenders targets of retribution crimes by would-be vigilantes, and that seems to be just what was attempted in a case of arson in Evansville, Indiana. There, a ...

The Internet has, in many ways, made it more difficult for parents to keep their kids safe. Children have access to just about any sort of illicit content you can think of. That said, the Internet has also made it easier to keep track of kids, whether by monitoring what they do online, who they chat with, or -- in this case -- quickly and easily finding the location of sex offenders in your ...

It looks like MySpace didn't quite look everywhere when it handed over the data of 7,000 sex offenders it found registered for its site earlier this year. Today comes news that the social-networking site has banned a further 29,000 people it calls sex offenders, removing their (presumably candy-laced) profiles permanently from the site. This move comes among growing flack coming from legislators ...