Smokescreen

Public or Private?

The kind of personal details we know about celebrities and politicians would shock our grandparents. Back in the 1930s, with the help of the press, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to hide his near-total paralysis from the public for years. It's unimaginable that the US President or our own PM would be able to hide such a thing today.

It's not just celebrities who are making things more public; we also reveal more and more about ourselves through social networking and blogging. These changes - good or bad - do have serious consequences. These days, if someone's determined enough to go digging, they can probably find out an awful lot about you online - even if you don't have any kind of online profile!

Max was very careful with his private info - he didn't keep an online diary or even a Facebook profile. But his mum did talk about him online on a public forum; that's how Melissa found out about his childhood secrets, which she used to push him and Cal apart.

Impersonation

It's easy to create a fake person online: Melissa created Billy by signing up for a new email address, making a new profile, and then filling out profile details. It's just as easy to impersonate someone online, by 'cloning' their profile - signing up for a new profile with the same name, and then copying their photos and interests and personal details.

Normally the victim finds out quickly since people tell them, but a lot of damage can be done before then, as Melissa proved with 'DriffFest 09'. In this case, her job was made even easier precisely because Max didn't already have a Fakebook profile. It wasn't as if there were two 'Max Winston's on Fakebook - Melissa simply impersonated him, and no-one had any reason to believe that his new profile wasn't genuine.

So what's the answer - create a profile on every social network in the world, to stop people from impersonating you? No. Online impersonation is rare, and usually not as harmful as what Melissa did. If you are worried about it, keep an online profile that your friends know is genuine, and keep a lookout for anyone impersonating you by using Google.

Playing (Un)fair

Just because some info can be found online doesn't make it fair game! Melissa is still absolutely in the wrong for using the information she found out from Max's mum, and by pretending to be Billy. She goes to extraordinary lengths to get her revenge. She fakes an online identity for a year, commits credit card fraud, posts threatening messages and gets Max falsely arrested by the Police. That's not even counting the hurt she causes to everyone touched by her scheme. Melissa's behaviour is clearly not just a laugh or a prank. It's malicious bullying that is potentially criminal.

Just recently an 18-year-old girl was jailed for three months for posting a death threat on Facebook. The fact that the words were written online makes it in fact easier for the police to prosecute these cases, as they have a clear written record of them. Digital traces can last longer than real ones.

If you don't want to be caught out by your internet activity, the answer is simple: don't put anything out there that you wouldn't mind reading out loud in front of your parents, your friends and your teachers. Cause you never know, they might end up reading it one day!

What's Next?

It's getting harder and harder to control the vast flow of information that's pumped into the internet by us, our activity, our friends, our parents, our schools and our companies. All we can do is try and learn some tools to manage it.

We're also going to have to ask ourselves lots of questions as a society. Is the lack of privacy a good thing? With everything in the public, we might move to a more open, honest way of living, with a more transparent government. Or is there value in privacy? We shouldn't have to reveal things we don't want to, and we should learn to respect other people's boundaries.

Whichever direction we go in, we're going to have to make some changes in the ways we think and behave!