iPhone app maps US sex offenders — on Sydney streets

A popular American iPhone application, available through Apple’s Australian iTunes store, was falsely listing American sex offenders as living in Sydney suburbs for at least four months, raising privacy concerns, fears of vigilantism and questions about Apple’s own internal policies when vetting applications for the local market.

Until earlier this week, the Sex Offenders Search application was placing several sex offenders on Sydney suburban streets. At Byran Avenue in Normanhurst, a leafy cul-de-sac leading to a park, the application listed a six-foot two white male with a record of indecent solicitation of a child. In San Souci, a man was listed as being guilty of “lewd or lascivious battery” of a victim aged between 12 and 15. Another was a  blue-eyed man, supposedly living in Fairfield West on Corona Road, with convictions involving the rape of teenager.

The high-rating app is designed by Florida-based company LogSat for American families, using publicly available, privately maintained American data. It’s also available from the Australian store as a free “lite” version, or for purchase as an extended-feature version for $2.49.

The application page in the Apple iTunes store claims: “Our world can be a dangerous place. Knowledge and awareness are our first line of defence”.

One resident (who didn’t want her name revealed) was gobsmacked that sex offenders were being pinpointed near her Kings Langley address in Sydney’s western suburbs. “It’s pretty scary that any company can create an application like that and put it on the internet,” she told Crikey, “because then that information is available to anyone who can start harassing people.”

Residents along her street in Kings Langley were being listed by the application as living alongside 12 registered s-x offenders, each in a different house. In her case, next door was the house of a man guilty of sexual contact with an individual younger than  11 years old.

“I can tell you no one of that name has ever lived here,” she said.

iTunes states the application was released here on December 9 last year, with updates for the iPad coming at the beginning of April. In the States, the app enjoyed a run in the top paid applications in the US shop and received national media coverage. One Fox report called it “a new powerful tool to spot sex offenders”, featuring a mother who even recognises one of the men in her search.

The application designers say there were 44,231 downloads from the United States in the last week. There were 51 downloads from the Australian store.

Using red pins embedded in a Google Map, the application locates almost 600,000 s-x offenders in America, including photos, descriptions of their crimes and even height and weight information. The sex offender located by the software on Bedford Avenue in Normanhurst actually lives on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Similar glitches are apparent in London, Paris and other cities checked by Crikey.

Roberto Franceschetti, the designer of the application, confirmed by email that the addresses had been mapped incorrectly. After reviewing his database, Franceschetti discovered about 200 incorrect entries in the southern hemisphere.

“At first glance it does appear that the majority of these 200 individual[s] are listed as ‘deported’ by various law enforcement agencies here in the US, and have been assigned an incorrect address in their records that resolves (again, incorrectly), to Australian co-ordinates,” he said. The company is now manually double-checking the data.

The application is downloadable in all countries that have access to an iTunes store. Franceschetti said all false searches have been removed from Australia, but problems persist in other countries.

He has not been contacted previously by Apple Australia about the erroneous results, which doesn’t ask designers to tailor products for different jurisdictions (Apple refused to comment when contacted by Crikey). The accompanying blurb on the iTunes store does let the customer know that the application only uses US data.

Stephen Blanks, secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, is concerned the product is available to Australian consumers. He told Crikey: “Companies such as Apple, which deal in products that reveal personal information, have an important obligation to ensure that their products comply with Australian privacy standards. Apple needs to demonstrate a commitment to privacy by removing this app from its Australian store immediately, and disabling the app for anyone who has purchased it in Australia, and refunding the purchase price.”

Blanks also highlighted the problem of mistaken identity, saying the application posed a risk to people with a similar name in the vicinity of a search.

In response to the so-called Megan’s Law (named after a seven-year-old New Jersey girl was raped and killed by a paroled s-x offender in 1994) , all states of America are required to make information available regarding registered s-x offenders. While individual states decide what information is shared, and how, the federal Department of Justice runs a national s-x offender database.

The Australian National Child Offender Register (ANCOR) allows police to share information between jurisdictions on convicted offenders, but there are no publicly accessible registries. In 2007, the Australian Institute of Criminology raised several concerns with a public registry, including that offender compliance varies, offenders can still “go underground” and that the focus on a few known offenders may distract attention from the more common intra-familial abuse. That was backed by research from the New Jersey Department of Corrections, which found Megan’s Law has no impact on reducing sex crimes.

The Sydney resident thinks Apple should apologise. “This is something you can’t ignore. You can’t sweep it under the rug,” she said.

James West is researching internet regulation at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of NSW. His first book, Beijing Blur, explored internet censorship and youth culture in China.