On February 28th, a Culver City startup created a watchdog website called RateMyCop.com, listing names and badge numbers (but no other personal information) of police officers in some 500 police departments and allowing people to post comments about police officers they had, ahem, "interacted" with (and allowing the officers to post rebuttals).
RateMyCop lists no information that cannot be obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. (As a matter of fact, that's exactly how RateMyCop gets the information.) Nevertheless, police officers complained about the site, claiming it puts them at risk.
Uh, as mentioned above, the site lists only names and badge numbers. So that would be a "No." In fact, anyone who wants to find out that information about you can do it without RateMyCop. Pages telling you how to do so — or offering to do it for you, for a modest fee — are all over the Internet. Law enforcement officers should already know this. What's the real problem here? Cops don't want the public to be able to rate their behavior and professionality?
Hey, the site lets you answer back. You think a comment is unfair, tell your side of it.
Anyway, yesterday, RateMyCop's domain registrar, GoDaddy, shut them down. This is nothing new for GoDaddy. In fact, it's pretty much business-as-usual.
There's a lot of the dirt on GoDaddy at NoDaddy. You want to hear about GoDaddy knowingly violating ICANN rules? It's there. GoDaddy shafting its own employees? It's there. GoDaddy stealing domains from its own customers to resell them at a fat profit? GoDaddy making unauthorized charges to customers' credit cards? GoDaddy using dirty tricks to block customers from transferring their domains away? It's all there.