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"Just in time for door-to-door Halloween festivities (i.e. that one night every year when millions of U.S. children venture to the doorfronts of strangers in quest of diabetes-inducing confections), consumer background checking company BeenVerified.com has released a mobile app to help consumers locate registered sex offenders in their areas.\nThe $1.99 app, which is available for both the iPhone [iTunes link] and devices running the latest version of Android, combines publicly available data from the sex offender registry with geolocation and augmented reality to make that data more useful and accessible to consumers.\nUsers can adjust the range of their search from a tenth of a mile to several. A map mode identifies registered offenders as pins on a map, while an augmented reality view allows users to look through the camera lens of their smartphones to pull up addresses in any given direction.\nUsers can click on each of the pins or red dots to draw forth detailed information about the offenders, including their names, addresses, photos (if available) and the offenses they were convicted for.\nUnfortunately, users can only run searches in their immediate vicinity, rather than from a designated address, but BeenVerified.com plans to release a search-by-address feature in the app's next iteration. The company has also pledged to update the app with details about new offenders and their whereabouts as that information becomes available.\nDuring a demo on Friday, I was able to pull up the profiles of 35 sex offenders in a one-mile radius of BeenVerified.com's offices on 28th and Park Avenue in Manhattan \u2014 a sobering number, to say the least. \nThe company has partnered with the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) and Antoine Dodson (of \"Bed Intruder\" fame) to help promote awareness about the app and sexual violence crimes. Five percent of all proceeds from sales of the app will be donated to RAINN.\n\"If you've seen my video, you know that keeping people safe from the threat of predators is an issue that's close to my heart,\" Dodson, who also starred in the promotional video below, said in a statement.\nPromotional Video Featuring Antoine Dodson\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/10/25/sex-offender-tracker/>