By Bill Thompson, BBC World Service News
There is a growing need to develop technologies that help us tackle the
problem of trust online, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.
Most of the discussions about Craigslist, the phenomenally successful
classified ad website that started over 10 years ago in the US, A
concentrate on the job ads and accommodation listings and how they are
challenging existing advertisers.
But the site is also used extensively for personal ads of all sorts,
including many from people looking for sex with no complications.
The ads, some of them very explicit, can be found in the "casual
encounters" area of the personals section, behind a warning notice
designed to deter children or the easily offended.
Hide and seek
In early September Jason Fortuny, a web designer and network
administrator from Seattle, took an apparently real ad from one
Craigslist site and posted it in the Seattle "casual encounters"
section. The advert was from a woman looking for a man.
Within a day he had 178 responses, many with photos. At which point he
posted them all onto a public website, complete with the photos,
e-mail and IM addresses and even mobile phone numbers.
He has since asked people to help him identify those respondents who
were more cautious about revealing themselves in their e-mails,
presumably so he can humiliate them further online.
In the end the question is one of trust, and of understanding what
levels of trust are appropriate in different areas of our lives, on
and offline.
Some of the men who contacted Fortuny were married. Some used their
work e-mail addresses or attached nude photos of themselves. Many of
them said things that they would not want friends, family, co-workers
or even casual acquaintances to know, and all of that information is
now available on a public, and widely publicised, website.
Fortuny calls his exploit "The Craigslist Experiment", but of course
it is not an "experiment" at all since it has long been clear to
anyone who cares to think about it that few net users have any real
understanding of the degree to which they expose themselves when they
go online.
Privacy row
The recent furore over AOL's ill-considered release of the search
terms entered by its customers, and the ease with which people could
be tracked down just by what they were looking for, showed this
clearly.
All Fortuny has done is show how far things can go, and in the process
he has probably ruined the lives of dozens of people.
Some of them will probably sue him, since although the US has no real
privacy law "publication of non-newsworthy, private facts about an
individual that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person" is
grounds for legal action. Some may be planning more direct action
against him.
Wired News blogger Ryan Singel has called him "sociopathic", and
although some of those commenting on Fortuny's blog think what he has
done is "cool" in some way, the general feeling is that he has gone
too far.
I agree. He has acted in a despicable manner, and deserves whatever
legal action is coming his way. He also deserves to be ostracised by
the online communities he was so clearly seeking to impress. We
didn't need to know about his experiment to understand that the net
creates new possibilities for public exposure. And we certainly don't
need to give Fortuny credit for his cheap trick.
After all, this was the week in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
apologised publicly for messing with his users' privacy and getting it
wrong at the massively popular social networking site he created.
The problems arose when a recent site overhaul introduced a "news
feed" feature which instantly notified users when anything changed in
their contacts' profiles, including when they made new friends, joined
or left groups or changed relationship status.
The user community, mostly US college students, didn't like this at
all since while all the information that was visible in the feed had
been available to anyone who cared to look for it, bringing it into
one place left them feeling exposed.
As a result of the protests Facebook has made some changes, giving
users more control over what information other people can see in their
feeds, and this may be enough to defuse the criticism.
And the incident has done a lot more to raise general awareness of
online privacy, at far less cost, than Fortuny's exploits.
Life lesson
Privacy breaches occur all the time, of course. Sometimes it is
malice, sometimes it is poor decision making, and sometimes it's
incompetence.
Over the weekend Linden Lab, creators of the popular and increasingly
hip virtual world Second Life, revealed that its account database had
been compromised and details of more than 600,000 accounts were
exposed.
Account names, real names and contact details, but not credit card
information, were all visible.
And the net's not the only place where personal details can leak out.
The board of Hewlett-Packard is still coping with the revelation that
old-fashioned surveillance methods were used by chairwoman Patricia
Dunn, who used private investigators to get phone records for her
fellow board members and a number of journalists after details of
internal discussions appeared in the press.
In the end the question is one of trust, and of understanding what
levels of trust are appropriate in different areas of our lives, on
and offline. Sadly, however, the answer seems to be that anyone using
the network should trust no one.
An e-mail sent to a girlfriend or boyfriend may be circulated widely
if the relationship breaks up; a seemingly trustworthy company may
have bad internal practices and expose you to identity theft; the
person you think you're chatting to on IM could be an impostor or even
your colleague's young child -- ask my friend Simon about this one.
But we cannot live in such a world and we should not have to. As
society developed from small groups where everyone was known to
everyone else we found new ways to make connections and establish
appropriate levels of trust.
We'll need to work hard, and fast, to find ways to make online
contacts work too. Otherwise we'll fall for scam after scam and expose
ourselves to humiliation or blackmail again and again.
And we'll fall for the oldest tricks in the book, like those who
wanted to believe in YouTube icon Lonelygirl15, who claimed to be a
precociously astute home-schooled sixteen year-old in her posted
videos and turns out to be an "art project" with links to Hollywood.
While the deceit may get someone a production deal or a show on an
obscure cable channel, it shows yet again that you simply can't
believe what you read or see online without some real evidence.
Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service
programme Digital Planet
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/5335054.stm
Copyright 2006 BBC
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