On April 1st, I covered an article by the L.A. times about a women who sued Match.com after she was sexually assaulted by a man she met through their website. There was a discussion on my previous post on this subject about the legality of issuing background checks to dating site users. The debate centered around whether requiring background checks would be an invasion of privacy to dating site users. To which I respond, there would be NO invasion of privacy. There is a reason sex offenders databases, and criminal records are open to the public! It is so future employers and others know who they are hiring/associating themselves with and it is certainly not illegal. If dating sites included a background check, it would simply save the users the time of doing a background check themselves. As such, Huffington post recently reported that the women settled her lawsuit after Match.com complied with her request to enforce background screenings for sexual predators! The article states, “Robert Platt, an attorney for the site, said Match.com has begun checking its members against state and federal sex-offender databases.” Now, only if every dating site used background checks then real progress could be made towards preventing online sexual harassment.
Thoughts?
-Maddie xx