Match.com's Move to Screen Convicted Sex Offenders Is a Good Idea

Not always the right match

​I was all set to make fun of Match.com's decision to start screening out current and prospective members who have been convicted of sex offenses. I opened up about 15 browser tabs, mainly pages arguing against the idea. Before I was halfway through them, however, I had changed my mind completely.

Opposition to the decision comes down to two related arguments: that it will create a "false sense of security" and that it's a "slippery slope." In other words, that Match might be opening itself up to liability -- or at least criticism -- when slimeballs sneak through its system and do something nasty. Without such a policy, the argument goes, Match has historically left it up to individual users to protect themselves from the prelimbic, single-helixed mutoids of the world, and has acted as a disinterested middleman.

 

Those are certainly legitimate arguments. But they're negated by the simple fact that, by screening, Match.com logically will have fewer miscreants among its members and hence, there will be fewer such incidents. Few people will assume that, thanks to this policy, all Match.com members are lovely people and there is no longer a need to be careful.

And those few people were probably going to find themselves in trouble anyway, since they are clearly naive.

 

The logic is ironclad. Pick any 10 people at random. The odds are that at least one of them is dangerous. Now crosscheck those 10 against a list of convicted sex offenders and eliminate those who come up positive. It's possible that one of the remaining people will nevertheless be dangerous, but the point is that it's less likely. That doesn't mean that people looking for dates online shouldn't be as careful as ever, of course. And it's hard to imagine anyone saying, "Oh, I don't need to worry -- Match screens out all the bad people." One look through the site shows that there are still plenty of marginal -- even creepy -- characters on there.

 

There is one argument that holds more water -- that Match will unfairly ban users who are on the national sex offender registry for petty crimes like urinating in public -- or who might even be innocent. But, well, them's the breaks.

I think if you're on the registry, you have much bigger problems than being banned by a dating site. And Match is a private company and can do what it wants.

 

If Match and its lawyers have determined that it will be cheap enough, and legally safe enough, for it to conduct such screening, that can only be good for its membership.