Website where anyone can post anyone's information to label them as a predator

http://www.potentialpredators.com/

by denzil_correa • 14 years ago

10 14 14 years ago

lutusp2• 14 years ago

> Website where anyone can post anyone's information to label them as a predator

Perhaps, but not publicly. If the Website listed someone as a predator on the basis of an anonymous tip and no other substantiation, they would wind up in court very quickly.

This is obviously a gimmick site, not likely to uncover any real predators. Imagine the thought process of someone who discovers a real predator -- "What now? Maybe I should call the police? No, wait, I could go to that cool website -- besides, the police don't care about child molesters."

Not plausible. It's someone's publicity stunt, not a real public service.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

Perhaps, but not publicly. If the Website listed someone as a predator on the basis of an anonymous tip and no other substantiation, they would wind up in court very quickly.

Did you look? Profiles of people are active. I think you are correct in dismissing it as not an honest public service. But rather than being a stunt, I think it's a scam to make money.

lutusp2• 14 years ago

> Did you look? Profiles of people are active.

Yes, and if the listed people were real, the site would be offline in a matter of days. Who is going to stand for being misidentified as a child molester online?

Unless, of course, the people listed really are molesters/predators/whatever, in which case they're already listed on the official sites.

Either way, this site is some kind of scam -- we agree on that.

flexxaeon2• 14 years ago

> REMOVE PROFILE > One Time Payment Of $99.95...

This is wrongfully brilliant.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

It's more commonly pronounced extortion.

terhechte• 14 years ago

Like a witch hunt with bribes

flexxaeon2• 14 years ago

Protection Racket 2.0

kadjar• 14 years ago

This is extortion.

There might be a way to fight them through this, if you claim that the poster didn't have the right to grant them the license:

6. Proprietary Rights/Grant of Exclusive Rights

By posting information or content to any public area of POTENTIALPREDATORS.COM, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to POTENTIALPREDATORS.COM an irrevocable, perpetual, fully-paid, worldwide exclusive license to use, copy, perform, display and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

droithomme• 14 years ago

No doubt they have a list of names in there that they draw a red line through after vigilantes kill them.

thraxil• 14 years ago

Worth noting that a lot of the profile pics in the search results are NSFW.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

The first question in their FAQ addresses suing them, to which they claim they are immune because of the Communications Decency Act, specifically, the part that provides immunity to ISPs and forums: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sect...

I wonder, however, if the law cannot distinguish between, say, Hacker News and Potential Predators. Hacker News as an entity is a free-form discussion site, with no particular agenda other than being a forum for discussion. Potential Predators is not a discussion site, and it has a clear agenda. Reasonable people will assume that HN itself does not endorse individual comments. But reasonable people may assume that Potential Predators endorses individual submissions that they post. I can easily draw a distinction between the two. But I'm not sure if the law does.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that they do endorse individual submissions. I think that puts them closer to libel laws that apply to newspapers. It would be absurd for, say, the NY Times to try to use the CDA to defend itself from a libel suit by saying, hey, we just provide a forum for news articles; we're not responsible for what our reporters put up here.

That may be a crucial distinction, in fact: at the NY Times, the person who writes the article does not post it. It goes to an editor, and then presumably to someone on the technical side. I wonder if Potential Predators curates the submissions, and if they do, if that effects their responsibility in any way.

If grellas is around, I would love to hear his take.

olog-hai• 14 years ago

Another bit of scumminess: When you click to delete a profile, you are taken to a page where you're expected to enter credit card details. Despite the presence of a RapidSSL badge, this page is not encrypted. Even forcing https into the URL doesn't work.

tzs2• 14 years ago

Verified. The credit card submission just does an AJAX transaction, over plain HTTP, to 37.46.127.180. My tcpdump revealed my plain fake credit card details sailing over the wire completely unencrypted.

I've dropped a note to RapidSSL about this.

tzs2• 14 years ago

Some ideas to fight them:

Track down the owners of the site, their spouses, their children, their parents, their siblings, their friends, and their neighbors. Submit entries for all of those people. If they come down, resubmit them, perhaps with variations to get around any blocking the do.

The idea is to get them to take measures to keep those people off the site. If they do that, you've then got an argument that they aren't simply neutrally taking anonymous submissions from the public, but are taking an active editorial role in deciding what gets accepted. The idea is to try to get them to be seen as the publisher of the material, rather than merely as a service provider letting their users publish.

---------

Set up a site that crawls their site and grabs all the information for the people listed.

Your site essentially mirrors Potential Predator, citing Potential Predator as the source of the information. However, your site does not remove the information of people that have paid to have their information deleted from Potential Predator, meaning they still show up in search results.

People who paid Potential Predator to be removed see that it was not effective in getting them out of search results, and charge back the $100. Potential Predator gets buried in charge back fees and goes out of business.

---------

Turn them into a file sharing site, by submitting images that have MP3 files steganographically embedded. Then have the copyright owners sue them. The Communications Decency Act provisions they are hiding behind do not work, I believe, when the material violates IP laws.

---------

Hit them with DMCA takedown notices for the photos.

Website where anyone can post anyone's information to label them as a predator

Related Stories