There’s an infuriatingly popular application for the iPhone called Offender Locator, which essentially accesses the state databases of US sex offenders to provide information on sex offenders such as their names, pictures, criminal records, and locations. For those who don’t know, when you commit anything that’s considered a sex crime in the United States, your information is kept on a public database in perpetuity. Now all of this information has always been accessible via the internet – what the iPhone application changes is that it allows users to see where sex offenders are relative to their current locations via the GPS. Oh, and this application costs money.
The makers of Offender Locator should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. They are profiteering from fear mongering. People in the US are absolutely horrified of sex crimes, even given their low frequency when compared to other sorts of dangers. Over the years, many organizations have turned profits by doing exposes on how if you leave your child alone with a computer, he will get raped by some creepy guy from down the street just as surely as the sun will rise the next day. To the credit of the television networks and news outlets in question, they never give real statistics, but that’s also a means of taking advantage of the public. A mother watching a special on sex predators is not going to think that the probabilities are low, but that if there is a chance that her kid can be abused, then he certainly will.
You know what’s more of a danger to your kids than sex offenders? Cars. Your kid is way more likely to get hit by a car and die than Mr. Johnson from down the road is to lure your kid into his unmarked white van. Yet no one is marketing an iPhone application that finds cars. This is again a problem of the human psyche: people aren’t as afraid of things that they think they control. I can assure you that despite the best efforts of parents around the world, children are still killed by cars more often than they are taken advantage of by perverts. The damn app was pulled from the App Store for a while due to some new state law in California, but it has recently made a resurgence. Seriously, don’t buy Offender Locator or any similar program. It’s merely a sleazy company’s attempt to profit off of fears that are way blown out of proportion.
