Hey there! Sorry it took me a couple of days to respond to this. Got wrapped up in work, personal life stuff, the Netflix binge rabbit-hole, etc. ;)

First of all, thanks for sharing what you did about your father. It takes some bravery to talk about that publicly. I also grew up with a parent (my mom) who struggles…

All the Predator Alert Tool databases are unmoderated by design. In short: It is not our prerogative as developers or admins to arbitrate whose stories of abuse are "true" or "false", and we trust our users to be critical thinkers who can determine what information is useful vs. not useful to them.

Maymay isn't…

story645 said: "there are accusations that he's been using this extension (or an earlier one he made for fetlife) to mine people's data so that he could prey on them."

So, I actually wrote out a long comment explicating some of the conflict between Maymay and the BDSM scene. But I decided not to post it publicly, because I realized I would just be enabling further derailing of the conversation.

All I will say, briefly, is that Maymay was heavily involved in BDSM community and…

torchbearer2 said: "I am curious to see (though, no real way to test it) if people who use these sort of services let their guard down easier than those who would not?"

I'm very curious about that myself. As a sociologist, I wonder whether there actually *might* be some way to test that. Hmm...

torchbearer2 said: "How…

Hey Alan! Thanks for the warm welcome. :) I was actually right in the middle of writing a comment about those rumors, but life kinda got in the way today. I am hoping to pop back in soon, though, and do what I can to address peoples' concerns!

Hiya, I'm one of the developers of the tool. I wrote sort of a long ramble above in reply to EmperorNorton that addressed some of this stuff, but the TL;DR is:

Sheesh! Sorry for the incredibly long replies! I just really love talking about the tool and I'm not nearly as good at explaining it succinctly as Alan was. :/ Hope that cleared some stuff up, tho.

P.S. I heart your username. :)

3. EmperorNorton said: "It worries me that people might feel safer than they actually are with this."

2. EmperorNorton said: "People will even answer honestly for a dating site?"

You make a good point that people on a dating site are usually "fudging", if not outright lying, to make themselves look good to potential dates. (Although, to be fair, actual sociopaths are notoriously *better*, not worse, at telling people…

There are a couple of things to think about here:

Hi, I'm Rebecca, one of the collaborators on the Predator Alert project. Thank you for such a solid and succinct explanation of PAT-OKC! I sometimes have trouble explaining how it works to folks because I get too bogged down in all of the technical details, but this is a great write-up — both of how the tool works and…