A complaint from a parent and a school-district official prompted GeoCities to quickly take down a Web site that listed recent female graduates of a Palo Alto, California, middle school and contained explicitly sexual commentary about their appearance and personality.
Irv Rollins, the Palo Alto school district's assistant superintendent for student services, said a parent phoned him Tuesday to complain about the site and gave him the URL. He said a quick scan of the site showed a list of 125 to 150 June graduates of J. L. Stanford Middle School, along with at least one male student and one female and two male teachers.
Rollins characterized the page as the work of an adolescent, and said that the nature of the comments about students clearly violated California Education Code guidelines against sexual harassment.
"Some comments were very explicit sexually, and very offensive," he said.
He said he called GeoCities headquarters in Santa Monica, California, and that "in a very few minutes," employees there agreed that the site violated terms of service and pulled the site. GeoCities did not immediately return calls from Wired News for comment.
"I evaluated this as a father, as a husband, as a brother, and as a friend, and I would not be pleased if my daughter, wife, or friend were on that list," Rollins said.
