Texas Politicians Want To Make It A Felony To Create Intimidating Fake Online Profiles

from the if-you-intimidate,-please-be-real dept

The latest in a long line of questionable "cyberbullying" legislation has shown up in Texas, where the legislature has approved a bill that would make it a felony to create a fake social networking profile with intent to "harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten" anyone. Of course, that seems rather broad. Oddly, the article doesn't mention the Lori Drew case (Update: actually, it does mention Lori Drew at the bottom... but says this law wouldn't apply, because it only applies to fake profiles of "real people"), though, it does mention the Tony La Russa/Twitter legal battle, even though it's difficult to think any court would rule a parody profile as being with intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten. Of course, even if the bill is signed into law, Eric Goldman notes that it would likely have trouble surviving much of a challenge, pointing out the oddity of singling out "social networking sites" and (more importantly) the fact that any such law would likely ban all sorts of protected free speech. Still, "anti-cyberbullying" laws are all the rage these days, and politicians want to make sure they can tell constituents that they're out there "protecting the children," so expect to see plenty more of this type of legislation.

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How Does Taking Away A Popular Feature 'Improve Netflix'?

from the please-explain dept

I am not currently a Netflix customer, but one of the features of the service that I thought was quite useful (and I know plenty of people who use it actively) was the "profiles" feature that let a single family/household set up separate queues of movies they wanted. So, for example, a husband, wife and kids could each get their own list of movies with separate logins, rather than having to manage a single queue. This made the service a lot more useful for a household. And yet... Netflix is eliminating the feature, and doing so with the bizarre Orwellian explanation:

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

Can someone explain how eliminating a feature that many people use improves the Netflix website? You see, Netflix, if you're going to remove a feature and say that the website is better because of it, it would actually help if you explained how or why it's better (i.e., you're replacing that feature with something better). To simply say that removing a well-liked feature makes the website better without any further explanation, you're basically calling your customers stupid because you think they'll believe what's clearly bogus.

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Your Dating Profile Not Exciting Enough? Just Borrow Someone Else's

from the nobody-knows-you're-a-dog dept

Now that online dating has become commonplace, would-be suitors are having a hard time making themselves seem interesting in an increasingly large dating pool. So, what to do if your own interests and achievements are boring and average? Well, just borrow the good bits of the exciting profiles that you find, and add them to your own. Apparently, these acts of profile plagiarism are fairly commonplace now amongst the online dating set. When people find well-written, exciting descriptions, they grab them for their own profiles. Unfortunately for the daters, eventually, a real-world meeting delivers a product that the marketing has misrepresented, and disappointment usually results. Although in some cases, it's possible to track down the "original" author, most origins are fairly difficult to trace -- surely more than one person enjoys "long walks on the beach."

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Deleting Your Facebook Profile Isn't So Easy

from the they're-saving-it-for-when-you-realize-what-a-huge-mistake-you-made dept

On Friday, we jokingly noted that Bill Gates was erasing his Facebook profile. However, the NY Times is now reporting on just how difficult it actually is to erase your profile on the site. Basically, you can "deactivate" it, but it still exists and can be found by users of the service. Of course, some might argue that it's rather silly to try to delete anything once you've put it online, and that counts for social networking profiles as well as other content.

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