MySpace Gets (Way) Personal with Sentry

Widely reported today: MySpace has teamed with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., creators of the Sentry system for "voluntary" ID authentication and background checking, to implement, within 30 days, a solution that automatically screens MySpace profiles to determine if page-owners are convicted sex offenders. According to the release, MySpace employees will then "delete their profiles." Says CEO John Cardillo, the company is also looking at image-analysis software and other means whereby sex offenders using MySpace can be recognized, even if they don't use their real names in registering.

By now, all the computer people reading this are laughing ("Ha, ha, ha! They'll just use false ID, assumed names, fake photos, etc.") -- except presumably those who:

• Have actually been victimized, or know someone who has.
• Are involved in police and legal casework and forensics, so see what sometimes happens to the unwary/unlucky.
• Work in the field of authentication, so grasp materially how difficult it is to provide adequate technical solutions to these social problems.
• Have enough experience with large online communities to have seen how deep stone-cold weirdness runs in the American middle class.
• Are actively involved in computer dating and other socializing, or
• Have children who go online.

Those folks aren't laughing. Hopefully, however, if they understand computing, they'll follow that this great PR move by MySpace will not, in fact, increase anyone's security. That it indeed may winnow out a tiny minority of lazy dangerous people for ... I dunno ... a week? Until somebody figures out, packages and posts the right combination of anonymous email hosts, proxies and other "best-practice" tools (all probably legal) to allow anyone to circumvent this protection. The smart, motivated dangerous folks, of course, will find out everything they need to know via Google, and be back on MySpace within a couple hours.

Pollyanna-ish aside: I note that the vast majority of folks online are pillars of their communities, and pose no risk to anyone. I also note that just because a person spends time at "Furry-only BDSM" clubs in Second Life, it doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to marry them. Of course, the proposed solution will not provide background checks of such depth, either ... yet.

But "yet" is the operant word, here. Sentinel's main product (not the system discussed above) is Sentry, which is (according to their website at sentryweb.com) a quick way of checking your name/SS# against public info sources, and returning ... well, presumably returning a link to a report detailing your real (first) name, real city of residence, real age, and prior convictions.

Sentry is marketed to online service providers (e.g., people who run dating sites) on the one hand, and to consumers of these services, on the other. The drift is that Sentry wants online services to provide links and APIs facilitating queries of their system by users, and ways of posting returned reports in online profiles so that other users can access them. They then want users to voluntarily ask for their own reports, and post results.

This makes me yearn for the bad old days when "nobody on the Internet knew you were a dog." The privacy issues alone are mind-boggling: it's trivial to design bots to capture these profiles and work a variety of public-records sources (including, most obviously, the services worked to produce them in the first place) to rebuild whole records or, failing that, to acquire enough surround information to demographically slot the user in ways that Yohimbe-extract and "size optimization system" vendors will find appealing. But heck ... there are lots of ways to steal identities and expose folks to spam that aren't nearly so laborious to implement.

The real, Orwellian deal, here, is that Sentinel has figured out a way to harness social pressure and paranoia to induce people to compromise their own privacy, "voluntarily." This is an order of magnitude weirder than simply putting public records online and, say, charging $35 for a identity-check -- though the latter service, now available for close on a decade on the 'Net and trivially accessible for years before that to folks in the know -- clearly does much damage. Still, that's "calling party pays" -- and the person doing the checking pretty much has to signal their intentions (i.e., "What's your exact street address? Is there a hyphen in that?"), or wait a decent interval after first meeting in order to accumulate the necessary input data in normal, friendly discourse.

This Sentry thing is scarier. It must provide a legal shield to the service provider, who can then (as so many already do) blithely profit by creating/hosting environments that pump up the social and sexual volume well past the point where people start getting stupid. On the other hand, it also engenders huge pressure on people to certify and reveal information about themselves as early as possible -- not even as early as possible in a specific relationship, but as early as possible in ones involvement with an online community of interest.

Why? Because once you start chatting or emailing with someone, it very quickly starts feeling rude to say "Well, I'd love to meet you for coffee, and we could do that Tuesday if you'll just certify yourself with Sentry in the meantime." This is not, therefore, how it's going to work in many cases. Instead, people are going to certify themselves right off the bat, because they think it's expected (which it increasingly will be), and they're going to make the information public immediately, so that creepy dialogue won't interrupt the later flow of all the relationships they hope to engage in.

I have great sympathy for people's fears. But if this is pointing towards the endgame, I have to say: Just say no. Don't let your kids use MySpace. Don't date online if you're stupid. Don't date at all if you have no tolerance for risk. And don't help create "safe zones" for multibillion-dollar corporations under the guise of individual empowerment.

I have delayed mention of this last point because these issues of risk and privacy affect men and women equally in large respect. But to conclude, I want to add that part of the paranoid dynamic making such "solutions" seem acceptable is anti-male prejudice; and that pressure to self-certify via such means will inevitably fall disproportonately on men. And that's unfair -- particularly since most of the nice guys of my acquaintance have, at one time or another, burned mental calories wondering how to better signal their good intentions in social and public situations. As a big man, living in a big city, I've often wished for a way to signal unambiguously to those who might feel threatened by my proximity that I'm a nice, law-abiding guy. So now I have one, right? But it's not quite the unalloyed blessing that I expected.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 08:30 AM  Permalink