The Internet Demonised

I couldn’t help noticing in the news this morning that in response to “Men jailed for online rape plot - BBC the UK government has decided to combat this behaviour by a Plan to list paedophile web names - BBC. The idea behind this is that all identified sexual offenders will give their online details to authorities. Given that even ordinary people when online

1. use many different aliases, not their real names.
2. use multiple email addresses, primarily to avoid spam.

do the authorities really think that this is a worthwhile exercise?

Now this approach would never be suggested, much less announced to the world in the context of a low-tech situation but it seems any crime perpetuated on the Internet (which is just a medium) is solved by building a database.

Would the same policy unit suggest that criminals be given a telephone number or web site to contact, to notify the authorities of their impending criminal activities? If banks haven’t solved the issue of money-laundering and government authorities can’t manage immigration, how is a database going to solve criminal behaviour?

The medium is not to blame here. It’s the criminals and their behaviour that should be addressed.

Also in the news, in a bid to make the internet less risky for children, the forth annual Net safety day marked worldwide today. The key statement in this article is “There’s a huge gap between what the children use technology for and what older people do with it,”.

So it’s people that make the internet what is it, not the technology.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Crime, Internet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 18:18 and is filed under Dawn Ahukanna, technology bubbles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.