Create your own pedophile bait!
We received an ad in the mail, recently, which immediately disturbed Lacey and I. It’s a service that lets you create real, usable postage stamps with a picture of your choice. Sounds kinda cool, right? But take a look at the ad, and see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture:
It seems like a cool concept, at first, to put whatever picture you want (as long as it’s yours/legal/etc) on stamps. But this ad is proudly showing a picture of a cute little kid, on a stamp. That would be cool if you’re just sending mail to your friends and family, and nobody was going to handle that mail in between.
But the reality is that several people are going to handle each piece of mail, and you’re probably going to send some to billers/rebate warehouses/misc. companies as well, and multiple people will probably handle the mail within those companies. If any of those people happens to like little kids, in a NAMBLA sort of way, then you’ve just given them your cute kid’s home address via the return address on the other corner of the envelope.
In other words, you’re announcing, “Hey, pedophiles! Here’s a picture of my cute kid, and here’s where to come get him/her!”
I remember Lacey talking about some online moms’ group forums where there was some controversy, a while back, when people posted their addresses (for swaps/co-ops/etc) publicly and had cute pics of their kids in their signature blocks. These stamps aren’t quite as bad, I think, because at least their exposure is limited to a few people handling snail mail, whereas the online message boards are googleable.
But, still, stamps.com might want to consider this before enabling proud, naïve parents to advertise their children this way. Art would be fine. Maybe even the family pet. But not children.
subscribe to entries feed
July 18th, 2007 at 8:19 am
I think that’s slightly paranoid. I think a pedophile would use some criterion in choosing his target — like, a house with low-security, parents who don’t watch their kids, a playground, a preschool — places where parents aren’t around and should be. And you have a housewife at home 24/7. Of course it’s better safe than sorry, but I think this would increase the odds by like 0.00000000000000001%. :)