California:

Fran Pavley, a Southern California Democrat, has introduced a bill that would require online dating sites to conduct background checks on their members — or else tell users they have not done so. The disclosure must be in 12 point type or larger. Bold. ALL CAPS. No more than 3 inches from the top of every relevant page (that’s a lot of pages). And in every e-mail members receive from other members.

Here comes the rub:

If all this isn’t enough to persuade lawmakers to dump this bill into the online hall of shame, consider the following. It’s a special-interest bill, where the “special interest” is one company. The legislation has been shopped from state to state by True.com, an online dating site that advertises that it conducts background checks.

If True.com’s background checks are indeed what online dating consumers are looking for, then the company will do just fine without this law.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 10:35 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under There Oughtta Be a Law, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.