The Ethics of Online Nannies

Recently in this space I have written about scammers (and worse) lurking in online dating sites, and the possibility of people using a site dedicated to protecting you from such miscreants to steal a “safe” identity for exactly that purpose. As a capitalist I’m opposed to excessive interference and regulation of business enterprises, and as a supported of civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, I’m opposed to limitation of free speech or freedom of expression in any form – including limits placed on the speech of people of whom I don’t actually approve. Accordingly, I’m not particularly in favor of companies controlling what their customers can or can’t say online, and I’d be completely opposed to government-sanctioned limitations on the use of any public forum – but I still have to ask if companies have an ethical responsibility to protect their customers from online threats, assuming that’s even possible…

In the case of the dating sites, there’s no practical way for the company that runs them to determine if the people signing up are who them claim to be – even assuming it was practical in a financial sense for these sites to run background checks on their customers, it still would not be possible. It would be possible for them to delete all of the inactive accounts – the ones whose owners have stopped paying for them and left the service – and it would also be possible for them to compile and investigate accusations of scammers and spam senders (to the extent that there’s a difference). But it’s difficult to imagine what such a company could do about an otherwise unremarkable user who signed up for their service specifically to look for targets against whom to commit crimes, even assuming that they wanted to…

It’s important to remember here that all businesses assume a certain amount of risk simply by opening their doors, and while it is possible that a random customer will sue you for negligence and be awarded more than the total assets of your corporation, unless you are, in fact, negligent, this is not likely to happen. Similarly, while the number of people who use (or wish to use) online social networking services (including dating services) is evidently quite large, the number of serial killers using these same services in order to identify potential victims is relatively low. No online service can actually render its services 100% risk-free, any more than the city in which you live can promise you that you won’t be mugged walking down any given street. But as with law enforcement and personal freedom, the issue here becomes how much control you would be willing to give up in exchange for safer Internet dating…

Do online services have an ethical responsibility to patrol their own sites and active seek out (and destroy) accounts intended for illegal activity? Do they have a responsibility to their legitimate customers to attempt to detect potential criminals and turn those individuals over to the police? How exactly are online services supposed to tell the difference between a legitimate user, a potential threat, and a hardened criminal in the first place? For that matter, do the users of online dating or networking sites have any expectation of privacy or security when they sign up for such services, or should they be prepared to guard their own safety, watch out for themselves, and expect to see the company’s in-house cyber-security looking over their shoulders the whole time?

It’s worth thinking about…