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Facebook – welcome to the defamation age

This entry was posted on Jul 23 2008

Imagine that you’re on Facebook, MySpace, your blog site, or even your emails, and someone you think you know sends you messages that are inappropriate, suggestive, libelious, or even worse. Or, your friends start asking you about an online profile you know you never created. Or, you find that your bank account’s been smartly emptied of its monetary goodness, and you’ve been involved in online transactions you never did.

A recent case close to home has brought the growing blight of identity fraud into my direct field of vision. It’s not necessary to go into details, but perhaps it’s necessary to point out the ease of which any person with ill intent could discover and gather a whole lot of information about you.

For example, in just a day’s research, I was able to trace down the alleged perpetrator with only his name and a small piece of information. I was able to build up a pretty substantial personal profile: here are some of the types of information that could be at the mercy of public searches:

  • Your work email
  • Your personal email
  • Your nickname
  • Your uploaded pictures, including close-ups of your face
  • Any information on social networking sites
  • Any information on personal web sites
  • Your school information
  • Your home address (using the white pages)
  • Your place of work
  • Your age, your physical characteristics
  • Your associates and close friends/relatives
What to do, what to do? Well in an ideal world you’d exorcise your presence from the Internet. But before you go all paranoid and start deleting everything in sight, here are some things that I thought up if you wanted to reduce your searchability:
  • Use a pseudonym. Using a nickname on public spaces is a good way to make sure your blog doesn’t come top of the list. More importantly, this applies to the usernames that you choose to sign up to each website, or service, or something. I know someone who has 10 different “handles” – a bit extreme, perhaps… but once someone’s identified that your online nickname is fruitypie045 (for example) and you’ve used this name consistently on every site (from blogger to bebo to facebook to myspace), your personal details will all come out in the (google)wash.
  • Restrict access. Most social networking sites will let you restrict access to public searches, and also limit the personal information on your profiles so that only friends you’ve accepted will be able to read them. This is a pretty easy way to ensure that you’re in control of your blogs, journals and online profiles – and if you like posting pictures up of yourself, you can make it stays out of the hands.
  • Use a secondary email address. This is pretty relevant in terms of spam as well – I know of some people who give out one email address for social use (which doesn’t have any identifying information on it), and uses an official email address (with real name etc) with close friends and family.
For the majority of people, having an online presence isn’t too much of an issue – and celebrities find it totally unavoidable. However if you’re concerned about the privacy of your personal information, it might be worth rethinking how much info you’re giving away for free.
It remains to be seen whether cases of online fraud, impersonation and internet-related activities will become more and more common in the digitised, Web 2.0 future.
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Extra reading:

Stuff.co.nz – The stolen identities of cyberspace
Howtolaw.co.nz – Civil and criminal harassment
NZherald.co.nz – Facebook fake victim awarded damages
NZherald.co.nz – How a Facebook fraudster stole my identity

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One Response to “Facebook – welcome to the defamation age”

  1. By Cheryl on Jul 25, 2008 | Reply

    Ew, facebook!


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