Legality of Website Idea

[ARefinedGent]

If I was intent on going through with my idea, I wouldn't be posting here.

The idea may very well be foolish due to the inevitability that I'll eventually slip up.

But I'd just like one question answered: hypothetically let's say every single person I posted on my website was a legitimate sex offender. Am I breaking any laws by simply posting a link to their public Facebook profiles? Anyone can go to the Registry and find a lot more info than that, including their address. I fail to see how this is invasion of privacy or defamation of character, if the info is already public.

[Dogmatique]

If you are posting information that is available to the general public, you should fear very little from a lawsuit.

I note with interest though that you never answered the "why". Given that this info is a) already available and b) you'd have to be doing some work to actually get people visit your site in the first place, it would seem like a completely pointless venture.

[RickZ]

I believe this would be an unwise website idea to pursue. Your intentions seem to be good in that you seem to want to raise awareness of how sex offenders (and therefore, potentially online predators) are using the Internet and Facebook just like the rest of the population. By linking to their Facebook profile, it seems the only possible gain is that they can be - to be blunt - embarrassed for being on the Internet publicly. I state this as being the primary focus being that it is entirely obvious that sex offenders must use the Internet like the rest of us do.

With that said, by linking to their Facebook profile, it will certainly attract harassment and attention to their Facebook profiles. This, in and of itself, is subject to a lawsuit by people, of which, may or may not be easily dismissed. By having people harassing these individuals on the Internet, this, in fact, can aggravate them and their already sensitive conditions. With people suffering from certain mental disorders, it can cause such frustration that they continue back to their old ways solely cause of the attention attracted from your potential website.

For these reasons, and others, I highly and strongly recommend you do not do this.

Moving forward, you obviously have a sincere and admirable desire to protect children. In order to do this, you could always write an opinion article into a newspaper about how sex offenders (with absolutely no names being mentioned cause that would be an idiotic move) are using the Facebook like the rest of the population. That fact alone, however, is not enough to be noteworthy let alone being published in a newspaper since this is again, obvious. A different approach would be to have an officer engage in conversation with these individuals, through Facebook, to see if they are still offenders. This must be done by an officer in almost all states since all other people lack the credibility.

All in all, I recommend researching other ways you can protect children. Pursuing your idea would not only be foolish; it would also be dangerous.