[richardw]

I'm very sure a lot of things have to happen before a weird private message thread ends up in an accusation that ruins someone's life.

A false negative could ruin the child's life just as easily, so I suspect most parents might think that's more important. It's not necessary to choose either "privacy uber alles" or "think of the children". As with most things in life, there's likely a good balance somewhere between the extremes.

[flyinRyan]

>A false negative could ruin the child's life just as easily

For example? A child being preyed on by a pedophile? What would stop that from happening in real life? Maybe we should set up cameras every five feet since obviously if we could stop it (no matter how immoral we have to act to do so) we have an obligation to, right?

[richardw]

Yes, a child being preyed upon by a paedophile. Nothing would stop it happening in real life, why is that relevant? Kids can die from drinking too much water, but using your reductio ad absurdum, you'd accuse me of wanting to ban water. Obviously there's a reasonable balance, which you continue to reject.

People have obviously found that online fora are perfect to groom children, because you can approach a child far easier than doing so in a playground. You can also repeatedly try with different children without your likeness being plastered on a wall somewhere. Since it's an obvious target, and checking it can be automated, why not police it in a balanced way? Again, you only see one side of this.

Similarly, in real life if you had a cheap, automated way of highlighting interactions that have been proved to have a higher chance of leading to children being molested while still balancing that with the human rights of the adult, most would find a balance between "do nothing" and "be hysterical". We don't have such an automated mechanism, and I'm sure your cameras-every-five-metres idea is on the hysterical side of balance, so even using it is obviously a straw man argument. That doesn't discount more rational approaches for those who have more than one principle in mind.