SNS and impersonation, deception, kidnapping
A message is going around Orkut that a woman in Brasil was kidnapped and that the details available through her Orkut profile helped the kidnappers. [See Jeff's descript.]
Yesterday, when speaking with a friend, he asked me if i thought that identity theft would be made easier via SNS tools.
At this point, i hope that most people realize that the term “six degrees of separation” is not a referent to Milgram, but to a play. I think that folks forget what the premise of that play is. A young man comes to a family’s home, professing to be a friend of their son’s. He enchants them by knowing so much about their son that they trust him completely, even though it’s all researched.
Deception and impersonation are nothing new to social networks; it just went digital.
“In man this art of dissimulation reaches its acme of perfection: in him deception, flattery, falsehood and fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness, disguise, cloaking convention, and acting to others and to himself in short, the continual fluttering to and fro around the one flame — Vanity: all these things are so much the rule, and the law, that few things are more incomprehensible than the way in which an honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen among men.”
Nietzsche