You can ruin someone’s life – through Craigslist!
Isn’t it great? You can use Craigslist for *anything*! I just learned that thanks to this article.
Here’s the bottom line one DIY social scientist reached, and it’s this sentence from the article that stuck with me:
His first conclusion was very reasonable: “If a really malicious person wanted to get on craigslist and ruin a lot of people’s lives, he easily could.”
That is the reality of living in the Internet age.
Here’s what he did:
Recently, a blogger named Simon Owens ran a social experiment on Craigslist. He wandered into the “Casual Encounters” section of the personal ads where countless men and women were soliticing for no-strings-attached sex and wondered, Is it really that easy? As a test, he composed several ads with different permutations of assumed identity and sexual orientation: straight/bi men/women looking for the opposite/same sex. He then posted it to New York, Chicago, and Houston, and tallied the results.
Overwhelmingly and instantly, the ads from the fake women looking for male partners were inundated with responses, sometimes several per minute. All the other ads received lukewarm responses, at best. These results weren’t surprising, but some of the observations were… Many of these men used their real names and included personally identifiable information, including work email addresses and home phone numbers. Several admitted they were married and cheating on their spouses. Many included photos, often nude.
Apparently, according to the article, “a Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny” took the CL experimenting a tad further:
The goal: “Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get in 24 hours?”
. . . . [T]he response was immediate. He wrote, “178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress. Responses include full e-mail addresses (both personal and business addresses), names, and in some cases IM screen names and telephone numbers.”
In a staggering move, he then published every single response, unedited and uncensored, with all photos and personal information . . . .
Instantly, commenters on the LiveJournal thread started identifying the men. Dissenters emailed the guys to let them know they were scammed. Several of them were married, which has led to what will likely be the first of many separations. One couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed, as their religious family and friends weren’t aware of their lifestyle. Another spotted a fellow Microsoft employee, based on their e-mail address. And it’s really just the beginning, since the major search engines haven’t indexed these pages yet.
Scary stuff. Where do cyberlaw, the First Amendment, and privacy torts meet?
Where do cyberlaw, the First Amendment, and privacy torts meet?
It’s evidently not on Craigslist, cuz privacy ain’t hangin’ there any more.
This is truly appalling stuff although not altogether unsurprising when one considers spam would be ended overnight if not one person responded to it, yet millions do while ‘zombie PCs’ form the majority in households where firewalls and anti-virus software not present or felt to be required. It’s unbelievable not that people are ignorant – many are, that’s just the way it is – but that they flaunt their ignorance in the face of many dangers. And are willing to allow governments to take away their civil liberties if given a reason – and of course the reasons are never questioned. Privacy, like love or spirit, is something that cannot easily be quantified in a materialistic society and so is easily never even thought of. People operate on the principle that what is, is – and yet what is can always be changed and if we do not guard against losing what we have, we will, inevitably, lose it. These victims were fools but still, sadly, victims. One can only hope life lessons get through their thick skulls at long last. x