So you get home from the gym to find a Facebook friend request from that cute guy you were flirting with by the elliptical machines. He's nice, he's charming, but something about him seems a little bit ... creepy. How do you know he's not a sex offender?
Well, now, there's an app for that.
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It's called Friend Verifier and it scans all of your Facebook connections and requests against sex offender registries from around the United States. Since launching March 9, it has been used to check nearly 300,000 people despite minimal press coverage, according to Joe Panera, the Facebook app's creator.
Panera says he was inspired to create the app after years of female friends and acquaintances telling him about receiving inappropriate messages, first on MySpace then through Facebook.
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"The running joke was, 'You should create a creepy guy filter,'" Panera told Mashable. "Obviously you can't just see if a guy is creepy, but you can make sure people haven't been convicted of crimes."
As social media and casual sharing become increasingly accepted as part of normal life, Panera says simple tools like Friend Verifier become more important.
"I have a younger cousin who's one of these Facebook friend collectors who just accepts anyone who requests her as a friend," Panera says. "In this day and age that can be kind of dangerous, so this is really for people like her."
The app scans against a database of more than 800,000 convicted sex offenders, but actually includes nearly a million actual records as convicted offenders are forced to re-register if they move to a new state. Of course, it's possible to simply search for offenders manually online by name, but Panera says his app raises awareness and offers a simpler way to check potential connections.
As Friend Verifier moves out of its beta phase, two of Panera's biggest goals are creating a mobile app and making it simpler to differentiate offenders from law-abiding citizens who share a common name.
Do you think Friend Verifier is a useful tool or not? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, youngvet
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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