Anyone can be anybody

Case 3

Anyone can be anybody

My space and identity theft

With the evergrowing popularity of social networking sites, more and more people are planting their flag on some digital realestate on sites like myspace and facebook. With messenging services that far serpas traditional email, more and more people are switching to social networking for most of their electronic communications.

Some of the advantages include using peoples names , or in some cases clicking pictures of an individuals face, as aposed to the traditional email approach of typing in some cryptic email address.

As more people switch to social networking sites, the imporance of authenticity becomes a topic of question. Take, for example,

http://dixonkinser.blogspot.com/2006/08/myspace.html

Dixon Kinser. Dixon Kinser was a somewhat tech savy upstanding member of socioty. One day Dixon received a message from a friend giving positive feedback on a photo of Dixon with her daughter Quinn. "she told me she'd seen my myspace page, thought it was funny, thought my daughter looked beautiful and wanted to reconnect." Dixon stated.

What makes this story interesting is that Dixon did not have a myspace page. He had never used myspace once in his life. Apone hearing this, he did some investigation and low and behold found the page in question

http://www.myspace.com/the_indie_ninja

Myspace has an interesting take on this situation in their terms of serveses.

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/Help/Pages/HelpCenter.aspx?Category=3&Question=26

Question 26, of frequently asked questions address's what to do in the situation of idenity theft and unwanted impersonations. At first its worth mentioning the alarming fact that this kind of situation warrents being listed in the top 30 frequently asked questions, showing an alarming growth in problems of this type.

According to myspace if you are the victim of a case of identy theft then you must

"

Someone is pretending to be me - what do I do?

Solution:

In order to verify your identity, please send us a "salute":

• This means we will need an image of yourself holding a handwritten sign with the word "MySpace.com" and your Friend ID (your Friend ID number appears immediately after "friendID=" in the web address/URL when viewing your profile). We can then remove the profile that uses your identity without your permission.

• Please be sure to include the web address/URL to the profile in question when you send your salute.

• If the profile is an extremely obvious attempt to be cruel/false, you may not need to send a salute. Sending a salute will help expedite things, though!

• Contact us here.

"