Paul Roberts' Musings

Tuesday February 06, 2007

Forcing people to register email addresses

I heard a report on the news this morning related to proposed UK legislation which could force sex offenders to register their online identity ("e-mail addresses and chatroom names" are mentioned in the article) to allow for an early warning system when those identities were used in an inappropriate forum.

Now, I'm all for the concept of helping people to identify dangerous members of society (once convicted as such) prior to that danger manifesting itself, but I am left wondering how practical this proposed solution really is. As far as I know, it is trivially easy to create new email addresses by registering with one of the many email providers out there, so there is no way of preventing the offenders in question from having multiple online identities which cannot be easily traced back to the owner (presumably if they could be easily traced, this legislation wouldn't be required in the first place) and then only registering a subset of those identities. So how would this system actually work?